In DEBS 2013, Roger Barga from Microsoft mentioned in his keynote talk that Rolls Royce is proposing to its customers a model of engine hours as a service, and used it as an example that event processing can be enabler of changing business models. I recently talked with somebody about these type of systems and decided to follow up and learn more about the Rolls Royce system using the available information on its website. The service is enabled by "Engine Health Management" (EHM) The illustration above shows some of the engine sensors. The monitoring follows the scheme: Sense-Acquire-Transfer-Analyze-Act.
The sense phase deals with the activation and capture of the sensors.
The acquire phase stands for a combination of routing reports in various milestones (takeoff, climb, summary at landing) and detection of abnormal situations (this is the "derive" part of event processing).
The transfer phase deals with the communication to the ground operation center
The Analyze phase is a manual phase that take the input from the previous phases and adds manual control and decision about next actions
The Act phase deals with the actions required -- such as servicing and part replacement and determine the urgency and location.
This is consistent with the 4D (Detect-Derive-Decide-Do) model. Here the decision is mainly manual. It seems that this is one of the early cases where the use of sensors and event-driven applications are used to employ new business models. More on business models change -- later.
