Navy to Deploy New Tech to Prevent Maintenance Problems.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: NAVY TECHNOLOGY

Keeping ships at sea and their systems and subsystems functioning is critical for Navy readiness. To address the challenge, the service is about to deploy new technology at the tactical edge that could alert sailors before unanticipated problems arise while a vessel is underway.

It's time to leverage new capabilities to help with sustainment and create "more ready ships" as the Pentagon competes with China in the Indo-Pacific region and elsewhere, officials say.

"We will think differently about the fleet we have, and we will consider ways of getting more out of it," said a new Navy document released in January, "Surface Warfare: The Competitive Edge."

That includes "harnessing the power of data analytics to anticipate maintenance and modernization requirements that then translate into well-defined, well executed work packages...[and] continuing to improve our spare parts processes, to include those that should be carried aboard," it said.

James Moser, director of fleet readiness in the office of the chief of naval operations, said the sea service needs to know in advance if an important system onboard a ship is about to have a problem that needs to be addressed.

"We don't want to be surprised" by equipment issues, he said during a panel at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium. "If we are surprised, we want to be surprised early" before something breaks down, he added.

The Navy's current maintenance and business management process has been around since the 1960s, noted Capt. Scott Larson, program manager for surface ship readiness and sustainment at Naval Sea Systems Command.

It is "sort of a monolithic, static, calendar-based system," he explained during a recent briefing with reporters. "I think we can do things smarter."

The Navy is already performing condition-based maintenance with the help of sensor technology, but it hasn't fully leveraged more advanced capabilities such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics on ships at sea, officials say.

"We're doing remote monitoring. We're doing some automation and alarm recognition. But we're not doing AI and ML at the edge. We're [only] doing that on the shore side" of the maintenance enterprise, Larson said.

To change the paradigm, the service has launched a pilot program known as Condition-Based Maintenance Plus that could yield far-reaching benefits if everything goes according to plan. The "plus" designation refers to the addition of cutting edge...