We’ve seen a lot of very earnest people in Washington debating what it will take to straighten out the U.S. economy. While our elected officials have avoided the so-called “fiscal cliff”, they still have a lot of work to do to complete the formidable task.
The members of the ATA Spec 2000 RFID on Parts work group also has a formidable task. As we begin anew in 2013 to tackle this standard, I am hopeful that we will prove to be better at negotiation and compromise than the Congress.
A lot of hard work goes into creating a standard, and with the ATA Spec 2000 standard the effort is particularly critical since the outcome impacts first, the safety and security of an aircraft, and second, the operational efficiency and financial viability of an airline.
The reason I bring this up is that as a member of the RFID on Parts business and technology work groups for the ATA Spec, I have participated in healthy debates about what goes into the standard and how data, in particular, is formatted and protected. I think it would be useful for all those that must implement and comply with the RFID on parts standard – OEMs, airlines, maintenance organizations – to understand what theses committees are trying to accomplish and what the role of this standard is.
ATA Spec 2000 is an eBusiness standard, which means the standard exists to facilitate electronic communication between trading partners (i.e., not just within one organization). Appendix 11 in the standard shows people how to format data that goes on a RFID tag. Once you have that, you can write anything you want onto the tag and others will be able to understand it. Well, they will at least be able to read it. Understanding it is where the rest of the standard comes in.
So we have Chapter 9-5 which tells people when to write to the tag, and what to write. Once organizations consistently comply with all of those requirements, then tagged items will start to have a reliable and understandable data set that everyone involved can benefit from.
It’s useful to really get our heads around this because this is the key role of the standard we are trying to create. We are looking for a reliable, accessible, understandable data set that lives on the RFID tags attached to key assets. An eBusiness standard is all about the right information, in the right place, when you need it. Our job is to create a standard that will allow for that to happen using RFID tags as the media.
This is usually where skeptics jump in to say, “But the FAA does not allow us to rely on tag data.” That’s a terrible way to start any design process, including the design of a standard. When I hear that I hear, “This is not the database of record, so we don’t need to do a good job.”
Again, our job is to create a standard that allows for a reliable data set to exist in the RFID tags on parts. It is only when that is achieved that the FAA will consider the data on tags to be worthy of consideration. That is the job at hand, and it needs to be done with the best engineering judgment and without bias. It must be done in earnest.
