Secure Plant Operations Data Network

Many AEDC personnel are tasked with supporting facility operations by providing testing support, instrumentation support, facilities engineering and facilities maintenance. This requires personnel to spend some of their time in their normally assigned work areas and portions of their time in and around test cells, wind tunnel control areas, and on the wind tunnels themselves. The AEDC plant areas are equipped with a plant-wide paging system consisting of outdoor speakers. The sound quality of these broadcast paging messages is highly variable and dependent on the location of the listener in relation to the speakers and the level of background noise. As such, these messages are often difficult to understand. Streamline Automation proposes to develop a plant-wide voice and data communications network that will be based on Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology and take advantage of existing network infrastructure. Server-side software will be used to convert voice messages to text and text files to voice. Additional server-side software will be used to track the location of users within the plant. The system will utilize encryption to protect the content transmitted over the network, and will be designed to minimize transmission power to prevent message patterns from providing information about plant operations.