Navy ships are being designed and modernized for minimal manning, supported by automation technology that will incorporate more dependence on onboard component level intelligence in concert with distance support from the shore-side naval community. Streamlined business processes are being introduced to reduce total ownership costs while achieving mission requirements. Accordingly, the U.S. Navy is embedding diagnostic software agent technology into its Advanced Engineering Console System (AECS) designs to help keep ship equipment running reliably within the context of reduced total ownership costs. To this end, intelligent software agents automate the critical analytical functions necessary for cost effective Condition-Based Maintenance. Intelligent software agents deliver real-time diagnostics and predictive analytics for various mission-critical systems.
The technological innovations described in this paper deliver new capabilities for automated diagnosis of equipment faults, early warning of equipment health problems, automatic generation of maintenance work orders, and timely delivery of equipment health information to both the crews and shore-side support staff.
The exploitation of software agent technology for equipment health monitoring is rapidly becoming the only viable solution for converting voluminous raw machinery plant data into maintenance decision information. Software agents can automatically monitor, troubleshoot, and predict failures in complex machinery processes in support of drastic manning reductions on future ships, with a backdrop of more complex machinery systems and orders of magnitude more data to monitor.
A key benefit of software agents is their ability to automatically perform complex tasks in place of human operators. After briefly reviewing traditional fault diagnosis and software agent technologies, this paper discusses how these technologies can be used to support the drastic manning reduction requirements for future navy ships. Current work on a multiagent system for shipboard power systems is presented as an example of system-level application.