Operational Readiness & Capability Assessment Service (ORCAS)

Modern Navy ships have more moving parts and incorporate more complex system of systems than ever before. This trend has led to increased maintenance and sustainment costs, and increased man hours to diagnose and debug issues. This is a worrying trend as the Navy looks to reduce crew capacity and add unmanned ships to its fleet. To combat this, the Navy is looking for novel technologies that can reduce sustainment and maintenance costs and provide decision aids to humans as adverse and off-nominal events occur.  Our FRAIHMWORK software platform provides health, integrity, and performance monitoring; impact assessment; and mitigation for complex system of systems. ResilienX is proposing to develop an Operational Readiness & Capability Assessment Service (ORCAS) that will serve as a distributed mission effectiveness and readiness management system for the FFG 62. ORCAS will augment our existing FRAIHMWORK platform to provide real-time situational awareness, related to mission readiness and effectiveness of the ship.?  ORCAS will include an interface to provide input to FRAIHMWORK from onboard physical systems and their respective components. This pool of physical components could include an array of embedded condition-based monitoring sensors, as well as inputs from the FFG 62 Machinery Centralized Control System. ORCAS will combine these data with a digital model representing components and their relationships, developed using the ORCAS Offline Configuration Tool (OCT). The OCT will describe system elements in a manner such that Bills-of-materials, SysML, and Model Based Systems Engineering models will be easily transferable. The result of this offline process is a configuration file which is fed into the online ORCAS component.?The functional workflow will provide the ability to maintain a set of data for the system elements.  In addition to the real-time feedback provided by ORCAS, high level component-dependent entity (e.g., function, capabilities) events from onboard systems will be translated into insights that can be used to generate ORCAS' Mission Assessment Reports. These reports will consist of information that will feed the existing human-machine interfaces and equipment used by Navy Logistics and maintenance personnel. They will be composed of either data messages or human readable summaries such as hyperlinked HTML-based reports. As ORCAS is developed, ResilienX will apply increasing levels of sophistication in the design of how readiness assessments are developed based on incoming events pertaining to component faults and degradations. Methods to quantify and focus maintenance effort will be included in this work, including messaging, and reporting for existing system interoperability and graph-based visualization methods for conditional failure “hot-spots” and other insights. The ORCAS assessments and their increasing levels of sophistication will be explored in progressive stages and validated in the prototype during Phase II.