New Products: Aircraft Edge Computing

Direction of Travel

ZSAH’s Direction of Travel platform was built for the aviation and travel industry to monitor 1,100-plus destination routes in 170 countries operated by more than 400 airlines during the COVID-19 crisis. It provides a detailed view of the pandemic and general travel restrictions. It has a travel confidence index that easily highlights the destination routes that could likely become restricted or passengers may be concerned to travel due to how the pandemic is being managed by testing and tracing, and public response.

ClearBlade

ClearBlade is driving enterprise digital transformation through Intelligent Assets. The secure “no-code” application built on ClearBlade’s IoT & Edge Platform delivers AI, edge-native computing, and extreme flexibility empowering operation teams to get things done fast. Maintaining aircraft requires that mechanics service airplanes on a very demanding schedule with very specific tools and equipment. Equipment on an airfield is often misplaced, lost, or stolen resulting in expensive replacements, operational downtime, and redundancies. ClearBlade Edges are deployed to specific locations to process data from cameras, sensors, and infrastructure all streamed to a ClearBlade Platform to normalize and process into a common data system of record. Data integrated into Business Intelligence dashboards offer operational insights. Rapid time to market provides assurances that properly ensure compliance with distancing, occupancy, and safety requirements.

Pulsar

AICRAFT’s edge computing module Pulsar can perform ultra-fast processing of aviation data using artificial intelligence at low power consumption. Pulsar can toggle between low-power and high-performance modes, which can give a further four times speedup of its low-power processing. The module is highly customizable and supports more than 20 of the most popular machine learning frameworks. Users are able to develop algorithms in the same way as they do on desktops, leveraging open-source software. A unique range of 16 computing levels means power is never overspent and computation time is always optimal. Another key benefit is a configurable Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) scheme providing lower power, rad-hard level (default) integrity checks of critical data such as ML weights, bootup parameters, and more. The scheme trades off reliability, power consumption, and computational latency with simplicity through selectable settings.

AFIRS Edge

FLYHT’s AFIRS Edge is suitable for any aircraft and supports flexible installation locations including the E&E bay depending on customer preference or upgrade needs; enables airline’s independent data governance; and integrates with FLYHT’s JetBridge SaaS applications. It serves as an Internet of Things (IoT) gateway on the aircraft ready to support new IoT sensor technologies as they are deployed, delivering the right information, to the right person, at the right time. This is the power of actionable intelligence, enabling predictive and proactive operations in real time. With powerful onboard analytics capability, AFIRS Edge leverages innovative technology to allow complex analytics to be developed and deployed more efficiently than conventional AOC or ACMS updates.

Shift5

The Shift5 Compliance Module is the only OEM-agnostic platform that captures, analyzes, and reports anomalies in core network security log files automatically. Over 60% of cybersecurity leaders say their teams are understaffed, making process automation more critical than ever. The platform automatically collects, analyzes, and correlates data from each aircraft to provide better observability across the entire fleet. Data in log files and its formatting can vary widely across aircraft manufacturers, platforms, and even between similar aircraft.

The platform unpacks log files and automatically normalizes the data in them into a consistent format. This automation eliminates the need for teams to stitch together inconsistent data sets. It also enables the platform to quickly identify commonalities in fleet analysis globally, which improves the robustness and accuracy of the platform for all Shift5 customers. A single aircraft can log countless events, making manual assessment and prioritization of risks virtually impossible. Information about critical anomalies must also be made available to regulators and industry experts without delay to ensure flight safety. When the Shift5 platform identifies a suspicious or malicious event, it assesses its impact quantitatively based on techniques in the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. The platform also makes it easy to package and export analysis and assessments from the Shift5 console for internal team review and prompt regulatory reporting.

FlytLink

The Thales FlytLink Edge Computing system enables real-time processing of imagery from onboard cameras with artificial intelligence supporting such functions as the detection of obstacles and air traffic. It is designed to provide interference-free, worldwide satcom coverage in a small, scalable, and robust design. The ultra-compact computer, natively connected to the cloud, enables the collection and real-time transmission of data from onboard sensors and avionics, along with the processing of data in flight or on the ground using the latest-generation algorithms, as well as the hosting of applications that facilitate piloting tasks.

Edge 2.0

F5’s Edge 2.0 is designed with modern users and applications in mind. It combines the resources available in public clouds, customers’ on-prem private cloud or data centers, and even bare metal machines or intelligent devices in remote locations to virtually extend its elastic presence on demand. It embraces modern development and deployment methodologies to offer integrated application life-cycle management and enables DevOps with global observability. Where the security of applications is concerned, Edge 2.0 rejects the traditional perimeter-based defense approaches of the past and instead adopts a system that integrates security into the Edge platform itself and provides embedded tools to protect privacy. It separates the location for data processing and analytics from that of the application logic, while allowing all of it to be governed by enterprise policies. Edge 2.0 also recognizes when workloads need specific processing and targets workloads properly to leverage special hardware to obtain optimum efficiency. All of these are commanded by a unified control plane.