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

Performing reactive, run to obsolescence based end of life remediation and risk mitigation is expensive and difficult to perform given the restrictions of ship deployment schedules and available funding. Significant risk to ship capability and safety is further ensued when obsolescence is reached while equipment is at sea and unavailable for upgrade. The government has defined common practices to mitigate those risks while lowering the overall total cost of ownership. Activities such as parts list monitoring and screening can minimize risk by consistently cross checking ship equipment configurations against Government Industry Data Exchange Program discontinuance notifications. These practices, as well as the others defined within the ARINC 2000, are presently not automated by technology and require significant effort by personnel to implement. These processes can be automated through an open source solution which performs automatic software-based analysis of the remaining life cycle of shipboard equipment, tracking of COTS obsolescence, creation of mitigation and compatibility solution planning, and visualization of what if analysis business decision analysis. Our approach will perform this assessment through the integration of four innovative techniques for accomplishing data collection, data storage, automated software learning techniques, and web server generated analysis presentation.