Taxonomy & Theory > Commercial Origins

PHM Technology and the MADe Suite: Company History and Product Architecture

Company background

PHM Technology Pty Ltd was established in 2006 in Mulgrave, Victoria, Australia (head office: Level 1/15 Pickering Road, Mulgrave, Victoria 3170), describing itself as "an advanced engineering technology company that has developed a range of decision support tools for complex engineering systems that are mission/safety critical." Per its own marketing material, "the first customer for MADe was the Joint Project Office of the JSF [Joint Strike Fighter] program," with subsequent users in the EU, UK, and US.

MADe's technical originator is Dr Jacek S. Stecki, PHM Technology's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, whose academic background is at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) — specifically its Centre for Machine Condition Monitoring and Department of Mechanical Engineering — not the University of Melbourne. Stecki is lead/co-author (with Andrew Hess and Shoshanna D. Rudov-Clark) of the key 2008 technical paper "The Maintenance Aware Design environment: Development of an Aerospace PHM Software Tool," which is the clearest primary-source description of MADe's internal reasoning available (see made-functional-basis-connection.md).

This means MADe's academic lineage runs: Functional Basis vocabulary research (Hirtz/Stone/Wood/Szykman, US universities + NIST, ~1997-2002) → adopted directly by Stecki's MADe tool development at PHM Technology (Australia, founded 2006, Monash-connected) → commercialized as an aerospace/defense PHM tool starting with the JSF program → acquired by Siemens and rebranded/integrated as part of the Simcenter portfolio under the name Maintenance Aware Design Ecosystem (MADe). This is a parallel commercialization track to the Oregon State/NASA Ames FFIP research program (Kurtoglu, Tumer, Jensen et al.) documented in ffip-framework.md — the two threads share the same taxonomic ancestor (the Functional Basis) but there is no evidence in the sources reviewed for this knowledge base that PHM Technology's MADe directly incorporated FFIP's specific "Function Health State" / "Functional Failure Logic" terminology, or vice versa. They appear to be independently-engineered answers to a similar research question ("how do we propagate a failure through a function-flow model") arrived at via the same shared taxonomic starting point.

Why the taxonomy was commercially valuable, in PHM Technology's own words

PHM Technology's marketing material frames the standardized Functional Basis vocabulary not as an academic nicety but as a solution to a concrete industrial data-quality problem:

"MADe prevents problems associated with linguistic interpretation for functional relationships by enforcing a clearly defined vocabulary for functions and failure concepts. Synonyms for terms are provided with illustrative examples to assist the user in ensuring accurate and consistent usage of the taxonomy. Systems may be designed and used in many different countries so the consistency and clarity of language in the system failures database is increasingly important."

And, listed among MADe's "key issues... that MADe solves":

"data quality – ensuring that failure concept and functional descriptions are consistent by providing standardised taxonomies"

This is the direct commercial payoff of academic research whose original motivation (per Hirtz et al. 2002, see functional-basis-taxonomy.md) was explicitly to "reduce ambiguity" and "increase uniformity of information within functional models" for the sake of design repositories and cross-team collaboration — the same problem, transplanted from academic design-repository research into a multinational, multi-supplier defense/aerospace engineering context.

The MADe product suite architecture

Per PHM Technology's product literature, MADe is structured as three integrated modules sharing one underlying System Model and System Models Database:

MADe (core) — Functional Design, Detailed Design, Failures database, Analysis. This is where the Functional Basis-based function/flow modeling and Failure Concept Map propagation happen (see made-functional-basis-connection.md).
MADe RAM (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability) — generates and analyzes system reliability, availability, and maintainability assessments from the same underlying model.
MADe PHM (Prognostics and Health Management) — PHM System Design, PHM System Assessment, Fault Detection and Isolation, Maintenance Actions. This module consumes the core MADe model's FMECA data to solve the minimum sensor set problem: given a target fault-coverage percentage, it generates candidate sensor sets, calculates the minimum number of sensors needed for full or partial Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) coverage, and supports "what-if" trade studies (weight vs. cost vs. reliability vs. coverage) by re-running a "reverse fault propagation" observability check whenever the proposed sensor set is edited.

The three modules are drawn as a semicircular gauge in PHM Technology's own diagrams — Functional Design → RAM → PHM — visually expressing a design-maturity progression: awareness of potential failure effects increases quality of design, which in turn increases system reliability, in a virtuous cycle diagram explicitly included in the marketing material ("AWARENESS OF POTENTIAL FAILURE EFFECTS" → "QUALITY OF DESIGN" → "SYSTEM RELIABILITY").

Criticality methods offered

Per the product literature, MADe supports four distinct criticality/risk-ranking methods: Risk Priority Number (RPN), Criticality Number, Criticality Assessment Index, and Fuzzy Criticality Analysis — giving engineers a choice of MIL-STD-1629A-style crisp numerical rankings or fuzzy-logic-based rankings depending on how much precision the available failure-rate data actually supports.

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