Challenge

The U.S. Navy's Navsea 05P4 Damage Control Firefighting Group is responsible for all technical aspects of damage control, ensuring the Navy can perform this function by maintaining the best equipment and damage control practices.  Damage Control training is conducted at shore-based facilities as well as aboard ships to maintain a crew's readiness and training certification levels.  Navy personnel are trained on a variety of casualty scenarios.

Aware of MPR Associates' past expertise on a wide range of military projects, Navsea 05P4 hired the engineering consulting firm to create a Damage Control Training Management System (DCTMS).  Bringing the software project to fruition first involved understanding its challenges, which included analyzing the navy's requirements, determining design system architecture, deciding how to program the system, as well as which database to use.  Designing a system that could be deployed among multiple naval vessels, maximizing code reuse and minimizing deployment costs were all important factors. 

Another system, known as Automated Common Diagrams (ACD), has been fielded by other groups in the Navy which are not responsible for damage control training, to provide onboard crews with an electronic copy of the system's diagrams and system summary status.  This undertaking has been ambitious in that it models 39 ship systems, which is expensive and time consuming.   The MPR-designed DCTMS system, in particular the damage modeler software, is the Navy's first damage control software that ties spatial damage to system damage. 

Prior to the DCTMS system, the Navy used drill guides written by onboard trainers to conduct exercises.  Typically, the drill guide took two man-days to put together manually and was a time-consuming effort.  

Approach

MPR's highly qualified team of scientists and engineers sets the company apart from competitive engineering firms.  For this project, MPR assigned engineers with extensive military background to interview naval personnel, enabling them to become subject matter experts on the project.  After reviewing existing training manuals and capabilities documentation, as well as identifying and creating solutions to critical challenges, the MPR team was ready to determine the best software approach. 

After reviewing UNIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows technology, MPR laid out the software architecture and developed two software components.  The first was a damage modeler application that displays a ship's floor plan, such as its piping infrastructure, which allows users to select incident scenarios for various areas of the ship, and then simulate damage progression onboard.  For example, a software user can select a compartment in the ship and set it on fire.  The software looks up all fire main and chilled water components, such as valves, pipes and pumps, and determines which components are damaged by fire.  A component's damaged state is then evaluated as a system and the degradation to the system is shown on the screen.

The second software product was a training administrator application, which incorporates damage control events modeled in the first application and creates a drill guide for the damage control team.  Once the onboard training exercise is completed, participant's grades are transferred and stored in a database program for record keeping and scheduling purposes.

Solution

MPR engineers developed the software used to plan training exercises, generate drill guides and record results of training exercises.   Part of the scope of the project included creating a networked computer system that enables multiple naval locations (i.e. ships) to plot damage during an exercise.  The MPR-designed software system solution would effectively:

MPR's software, designed for both shore-based training centers and onboard naval vessels, is intended to reduce the administrative burden on the crew by reducing the number of man hours needed to put a drill guide package together.  The damage modeler software also will help trainers come up with realistic training scenarios by providing a capability to simulated ship damage and determine types of equipment involved, loss of system capability, as well as fire and smoke spreading rates.

Benefits

Capitalizing on the extensive military operations knowledge of certain team members and the software design expertise of others within the company, MPR delivered to the U.S. Navy, a software design that increased training effectiveness, increased feedback and provided a reduction in overall training man hours.  The first demonstration of the software, which was completed in eight months, was given at the 2004 Damage Control Fire Fighting Conference.  Additions and modifications to the system were completed within six months.

The project was a significant undertaking.  Each ship class has a ship database with ~10MB of information that includes the ship compartments, compartment adjacencies, system components, locations and more.  The software, which was operational in two years, will be installed on the first ships in the spring of 2006.  Reaction from the Navy has been overwhelming, with other groups not directly involved with this project inquiring about software systems for other ship classes.