General
S&T is a private company conducting challenging high-tech
projects and consultancy. S&T started in 2000 and has grown to a
diverse group of 30 scientists and engineers. Typical customers
and partners are the European Space Agency (ESA), TNO, EADS,
ASTRIUM, VEGA, Siemens, SNECMA, Logica and more.
S&T focuses on three lines of business. Firstly S&T develops
software for 'high impact systems'. These systems often require
extreme performance, accuracy and may involve huge datasets.
Furthermore S&T has a highly skilled 'pool of experts'. These
experts, working on-site at our customers, combine excellent
information technology skills with sound knowledge of applied
physics. Finally S&T generates business from the in-house developed System Health Management (SHM) technology and
associated tools. The objective of SHM is to optimize the operation of complex systems by managing its "health". Typical functionality includes: fault detection, diagnosis of system failures, prediction of system failures, and management of failures by e.g. system reconfiguration. Implementation of SHM-systems is based on, among other techniques, signal processing, data and model interpretation, statistical analysis, Artificial Intelligence (AI) reasoning.
S&T in Space
The space related activities of S&T can be divided into three
domains: Tools for Earth observation, Tools for Astronaut support
and SHM for next generation launchers.
- Tools for Earth observation Quality control of EO data products. S&T has developed several tools for ESA that are used for a variety of EO instruments (e.g. GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY, Cryosat and ADM/Aeolus) Handling EO data product formats. S&T has developed the open source toolbox BEAT for ESA. BEAT provides a universal interface to essentially all EO data products (ESA, NASA, UMETSAT). BEAT is becoming the de facto standard for data product formats.
- Tools for astronaut support S&T developed decision support tools for astronauts (on-board ISS or even Mars astronauts in the future) to guide them in the execution of their tasks (e.g. experiments, maintenance, etc).
- System Health Management for the next generation launchers S&T is technology partner of European primes in the development of the European next generation ancher. The SHM technology is used in these projects.
Space technology transfer
The SHM technology is successfully transferred in the recent past
to the industrial domain. Examples are the model based diagnosis tool that was implemented to detect failures of harbour cranes, and the model based diagnosis technology used by ASML to detect failures in the silicon wafer lithography machines.
