Analysis Tools for Managing Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Obsolescence

Performing reactive Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) component end of life remediation and risk mitigation is expensive and difficult to perform given the restrictions of ship schedules and available funding. Significant risk to capability and safety is incurred when obsolescence is reached while equipment is at sea and unavailable for upgrade. The government has defined practices to mitigate such risks while lowering the overall total cost of ownership. Active parts list monitoring and screening can minimize risk by consistently cross checking equipment configurations against industry discontinuance notifications. Such practices are presently not automated by technology and require significant effort by personnel to implement.Progeny utilized our extensive expertise accrued from over twenty years of systems engineering and integration (SE&I) across multiple software and hardware manufacturing initiatives to successfully create an innovative solution within Phase I of this SBIR which is built upon graph database technology in order to maximize the utility of relationships in our knowledge base. Our COTS Obsolescence Decision Analysis (CODA) solution performs automated life cycle management of shipboard COTS hardware and software and unsupervised creation of mitigation recommendations through the integration of four innovative techniques for accomplishing data collection, data storage, automated analysis, and highly intuitive information visualization.