Acquisition Decision Expert Planning Technology

The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) is laying out the Fleet Response Concept, in which it is desired that a fleet of ships is ready to surge and respond at a moment's notice. Such desire becomes more critical as today's enemy in the war on terrorism is unpredictable. Recently, a new process known as SHIPMAIN (Ship Maintenance and Modernization), a four-year program that began in August 2003, is the first step in the surface Navy's massive initiative to improve maintenance procedures.

As part of SHIPMAIN, a program known as the Surface Ship/Carrier Modernization Program is being implemented. The ship modernization process is very complex in nature and requires Multi-level Collaboration, Highly Interdependent Tasks, and Dynamic and Continuous Changes. As such, this modernization planning process is extremely complicated and tedious. This complication is directly applied to PARMs who are responsible for acquiring and developing systems to modernize Naval vessels.

GCAS is currently under contract with the US Navy for the design and development of a Web-based Interactive and Dynamic Ship Modernization Planner that addresses these limitations and: i) employs AI Planning & Scheduling and Expert Decision Support technology solutions that provide adaptive and interactive task planning, resource management, budgeting, cost control, risk identification and mitigation, conjunctivity and conflict alerts, efficiency analysis and configuration management to support decision-making at several levels of management, ii) ensures that multiple large legacy (existing) web-based data sources can be manipulated to allow real-time decision support. This planning tool will help PARMs with a strategic analysis of alternative capabilities that might go into a particular modernization/overhaul for a ship or a ship class. As a result, it allows Participating Acquisition Resource Managers to efficiently plan, coordinate, model and track all aspects of ship modernization at multiple levels of collaboration.