Incorporating Condition Monitoring for Multi-Faceted Decisions

The management of naval platforms should be considered in the context of the capabilities that they provide their operational community. A warship, often described as multirole, achieves `flexibility of role' through a complex network of integrated and interdependent systems. When these systems are coupled with monitoring sensors, there is potential to exploit the feedback for online and offline health assessments. The aggregation of these assessments can be conceived of as a multivariate vector corresponding to the capabilities of interest. This vector can be used as the basis of trade-off analysis for the differing courses of action under consideration thus forming part of the decision support environment. Another dimension of trade-offs is the consideration of decision making and planning tiers: tactical, operational, and strategic. Each level has a differing and nuanced understanding of goals such as cost, reliability, availability, and assurance; as such these tiers can find themselves in competition with each other. Condition monitoring provides additional input for dynamic maintenance activity decisions that reflect the evolving organizational context and the tiers' desired outcomes. This paper presents a framework for relating equipment health monitoring on complex naval platforms to a decision support environment consisting of multiple capabilities and competing decision tiers.