Aptima Awarded Navy Contract for Machine Health Monitoring, Alerting, and Troubleshooting Coordination
IoT-powered platform links distributed sensors with advanced cloud services, and can also extend into facility health monitoring
Aptima, Inc. announced today that it has received a contract valued at up to $1.5 million from the Office of Naval Research to develop IRONPIPE: The Interoperable Resilient Operations Network for Proficient Internet of Things (IoT) Performance and Efficiency.
The Department of Navy (DON) sustainment community provides key services and capabilities needed to maintain, repair, and update the nation’s Fleet, while returning assets back to the field as quickly and reliably as possible. Currently, depots and distributed maintenance workers are seeking a common operating picture (COP) to conduct operations and receive real-time feedback on their efforts.
Current-day operations rely on manual practices in situations where technology-aided approaches, if implemented, would save the Navy substantial time and money, while increasing overall efficiency and morale. In particular, machine health problems are typically identified reactively when personnel attempt to utilize the equipment and it fails in some way. Details on the problem – such as the asset’s location, symptoms, and its priority level – must be communicated verbally and/or through a legacy ticketing system, often requiring multiple follow-ups to resolve the problem. A central information hub that requires minimal human interaction to populate, yet provides quality up-to-date information for shared situational awareness, would help address this and other related challenges across DON maintainers.
Filling this gap will provide the DON with an enterprise-wide solution to optimize resource allocation and track depot maintenance capacity and specialties. Importantly, the envisioned common operating picture must fulfill key end-user requirements across the Naval Shipyards, Fleet Readiness Centers, and Marine Corps Logistics Bases.
To address this need, Aptima and partners are developing IRONPIPE, an IoT-powered platform that links distributed sensors with advanced cloud services, enabling near real-time monitoring and coordination between an organization’s most valued assets: specifically, its machines, facilities, and personnel. IRONPIPE achieves command and control of, as well as visibility into, the Navy’s maintenance enterprise through communication with the enterprise’s assets, aggregation of the assets’ data, and integration of the data into a COP. The COP provides centralized insight into fixed assets, mobile assets, and facilities, which (1) increases situational awareness, (2) decreases access times for critical tasks, and (3) improves overall decision making and coordination across personnel, including equipment usage and repairs. In doing so, IRONPIPE will ultimately save precious time and money, while reducing frustration compared to current-day practices.
This article reflects work performed on a SBIR Phase II project entitled, “IRONPIPE: The Interoperable Resilient Operations Network for Proficient Internet of Things (IoT) Performance and Efficiency,” under Contract N6833521C0177, sponsored by Mr. Stephen McKee of the Naval Enterprise Sustainment Technology Team (NESTT), whom the authors wish to thank.
For more information about IRONPIPE, please contact aptima_info@aptima.com.
