Challenge

The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces (DND/CAF) are seeking innovative solutions that provide the ability to rapidly account for the location and identity of personnel, at critical moments, inside ships. Furthermore, the ability of the same technology to enhance and simplify the current processes associated with permissions and authorizations for a range of routine activities and tasks inside ships, with benefits of simplicity, efficiency, automated record-keeping, and enhanced management insight and overview.

Background and Context

Warships are complex, self-contained systems which need to operate with minimal or no external communication and under adverse weather and operational conditions.

Accounting for personnel is always the first priority in any activity or incident at sea. Enhanced situational awareness of where people are, including in the dozens of pre-planned scenarios, enables the command to make good decisions under time critical situations, whilst under intense pressure. Technological solutions could have life-saving benefits when used to alert to a missing or immobile person in combat or in peacetime. The same technology could also optimize the administration necessary, inside the warship, to authorize and account for various activities which would achieve benefits in time, accuracy, simplicity, and record.

The complexity of the warships, coupled with the often adverse environmental and operational conditions, make it important to account for the location and safety of all personnel on board. In extreme cases this may require a manual search of all parts of the ship, a process that can require significant time – time which can be the difference between life and death.

Essential Outcomes

To take maximum advantage of modern and future technologies the DND/CAF are seeking innovative technologies, tools, and systems that must be privacy aware, robust, scalable and upgradeable, to enable important accounting and authorization tasks. The proposed solutions must include the following:

• Allow security staff to maintain and continuously update awareness about who is on-board the vessel;
• Rapidly account for all personnel at a critical moment, and alert the operators when someone unexpectedly leaves the vessel, both while in port and at sea;
• Consider, upfront, robust methods or tools for addressing the ethical and privacy considerations to enhance the likelihood of end-user adoption;
• Require minimal network resources, operate independently of internet connectivity, and be able to operate on vessels having different networking and communications systems; and
• Solutions need to operate in a marine environment but need not meet published military standards at this point.

Desired Outcomes

• Proposed solutions should include capabilities such as, but not limited to, the following:
• Have an ability to reliably share information between Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) vessels, and from RCN vessels and shore facilities;
• Allow verification of training and authority to access locations, and to sign-out and/or use specialist equipment;
• Create, update, and retrieve status updates and logs;
• Ingest and analyze information such as the above and display relevant data and insights in a variety of applicable formats (e.g. dashboards, reports);
• Have a simple and robust user-interface, preferably portable that can be operated effectively in time-critical high-stress moments;
• Have the ability to operate reliably and at full capacity at sea for months at a time; and
• Can be operated, maintained, and serviced while at sea with minimal personnel with minimal levels of training.

Supplemental Information

The network and internal communications systems on future RCN vessels have not yet been defined.