Modeling the Impact of Technology Transition on Ship Operational Capabilities

The introduction of COTS hardware, commercial standards and commercial development practices offers the opportunity for a rapid and systematic introduction of new capabilities and technology into fleet platforms. Essential ingredients for a shrinking R&D budget while warfighter needs and sustainability of systems are at the highest level in 30 years. Support systems, like the Naval Collaborative Engineering Environment (NCEE) are being stood up to provide the requisite Integrated Digital Environment (IDE) for the design, development, test and configuration control for the spiral development of capability for new ship designs and existing ship modernization. Missing from this collaborative environment is the ability to mix cost, schedule, platform, architecture and mission analysis information to identify capability and technology insertion that will provide optimal solutions for introducing related capabilities within and across platforms. The thrust of this Phase I effort is to study, evaluate and determine the feasibility of developing a prototype technology insertion planning tool that will analyze data from a mission thread operational view architecture and define existing or shortfall capabilities and technologies that will satisfy the warfighter needs. Phase II of this SBIR entails the development and demonstration of the model against a set of criteria defined in the NCEE.