Orlando Company Wins License to Convert NASA Technology to Commercial Use in Maintenance and Repair Operations

ORLANDO, Fla. --- Diversified Industries, Consulting and Investment Services, Inc. in Orlando, has earned an exclusive copyright license for NASA’s System Maintenance Automated Repair Tasks (SMART) software. Created by a team of United Space Alliance (USA) and NASA software engineers, SMART was used by the shuttle program to generate repair instructions for maintenance technicians. Martin Belson, chief executive officer of Diversified Industries, Consulting and Investment Services, said SMART software is a collection of repair instructions issued over 30 years of shuttle maintenance operations. The software was designed with intelligence to select appropriate instructions for specific shuttle problems and organize them into a repair procedure for use by shuttle technicians. “SMART greatly reduced the time needed to process a shuttle for its next launch, significantly improved repair procedure accuracy, and helped increase overall shuttle program safety,” Belson said. A former USA mechanical design engineer, system engineer and project manager, Belson worked on the development and deployment of SMART for shuttle operations. Diversified Industries is targeting aircraft and spacecraft Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) operations as its primary customer for SMART technology. Belson estimates the market potential for the software is several million dollars. “SMART can significantly reduce the time it takes to engineer repair and maintenance protocols for sophisticated industrial equipment by 30% to 40%,” Belson said. “That savings can number in the millions of dollars, depending on the critical nature of the equipment and the extent of the work to be done,” he said. Diversified Industries is a client company of the University of Central Florida Business Incubation Program in the Central Florida Research Park in east Orange County.