From vehicle bus to fleet readiness

Modern land systems generate a constant stream of operational data on the vehicle bus — engine hours, usage, events. Capturing that data reliably is the foundation of fleet management: knowing what each vehicle has actually done lets an army plan maintenance, manage spares and keep more guns available. Defence is adopting the same usage-data discipline that commercial-vehicle fleets built on open standards such as SAE J1587 and J1939. For a highly automated, hard-worked system like Archer, that data is the difference between guessing and knowing.

Archer — the BAE Systems Bofors 155 mm wheeled self-propelled howitzer, designed and built in Karlskoga — is one of the most automated artillery systems in service, able to come into action, fire and move within a minute. Sweden, the UK and Ukraine field it. A system that mobile and that heavily used needs its operators to understand exactly how the fleet is being run.

BAE Systems Bofors needed a dependable way to get operational data off the vehicle — not diagnostics, but the fleet-management information that tells an army how its guns are being used and what they will need. That data lives on the vehicle bus in heavy-vehicle protocols; it has to be read, parsed, made sense of and stored, on rugged embedded hardware, in the field. The purpose was explicit from the first design meetings: retrieve information for fleet management, distinct from the on-board maintenance system.

Diadrom developed the Fleet Management Interface Module (FIM) — a CAN logger application running on embedded Linux, on a platform of two FOX board computers, configured through XML files. FIM reads the vehicle bus (initially via SAE J1587), parses and manipulates the data, and stores it in persistent memory for later retrieval. A second generation, FIM 2, ran on the same platform with SAE J1939 support added.

The work sat alongside Diadrom's wider role on the programme — including the DAIM application and the EMMS PDA — with the operator interface co-designed with BAE's GUI team for the Linux handheld environment. As with its automotive heritage, Diadrom applied proven commercial-vehicle data standards to a defence platform.

FIM gave BAE Systems Bofors a repeatable, rugged way to capture Archer's operational data and turn it into fleet-management information — the raw material for planning maintenance, managing spares and keeping more systems ready. Because it was built on open commercial-vehicle standards and configured by XML, it could be extended without a redesign: when a newer protocol was needed, FIM 2 added J1939 on the same platform. It is the same engineering logic Diadrom honed in automotive serial production, applied to a frontline artillery system.

The value of fielded-system data only grows as armies push for higher availability and condition-based support. Bofors' approach points the way: standardise how you read the vehicle bus and store it cleanly, and you build a fleet-data foundation you can keep extending — exactly what the next generation of connected, data-driven land systems will demand.