Oxley e-tags

Citation

(2000), "Oxley e-tags", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 72 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2000.12772cab.035

Oxley e-tags

Keywords Oxley Systems

It is reported that Oxley Systems has won a contract from the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) for a joint research programme to investigate the potential impact on equipment life cycle costs (LGG) of Oxley e-tag (electronic data tagging) technology within the Royal Air Force (Plate 1).

Plate 1 Oxley e-tag contact memory buttons and reader

The study, which will be conducted over a 12-month period, will involve installing e-tag systems on board a squadron of Nimrod aircraft based at RAF Kinloss. In addition to accruing flight qualification of the Oxley e-tag system, the study will quantify the benefits of electronic recording of maintenance data.

The Oxley e-tag system employs coin-shaped contact memory buttons which reportedly can be attached to almost any item of equipment, providing an easily accessible and secure means of logging identification data, service histories and maintenance records on the equipment itself. The required data are written to and read from the memory buttons through contact with a reader connected to a hand-held computer.

Purpose-designed e-tag software package allows each tag to be initialised with user-defined data fields and these can be tailored to suit whatever information is required for the items of equipment or sub-systems to which the tags are attached. The tags contain up to 64kbytes of non-volatile EEPROM memory and there is said to be no practical limit to the number of times that they can be written to, read from or updated.

It is thought that, in the fast-moving field of military aircraft operations, the Oxley e-tag system represents an innovative and powerful tool for use in asset management and integrated logistics support.

Details available from: Oxley Systems. Tel: +44 (0) 1229 582621; Fax: +44 (0) 1229 483263; E-mail: systems@oxley.co.uk