Prognostic Tool to Estimate Mission Readiness Based Upon System Health States

Establishing mission readiness depends on interpretation of current condition, historical trends, and class propensities to first establish system health, and then to derive readiness from health conclusions. This proposed approach to predicting mission readiness uses an extensible generic architecture to integrate existing tools with others still in development, such that the prognostic system can be flexibly extended to accommodate all shipboard equipment. The approach maximizes use of industry standards to provide interoperability and access for OEMs who can build equipment that plugs into the architecture and reports its health in standard format. The approach includes definition of a generic health module, or pattern, that enables this form of integration. This approach to mission readiness also creates the means for expert knowledge related to equipment health to reside very close to the equipment, which enhances modularity and simplifies upgrades. Another innovation provides the ability to distribute the logic that performs judgments about mission readiness so it too resides close to the equipment. This offers advantages when the system is asked to respond to "what-if" questions about future capability from the operators or from automated planners.