MAPLEWELL INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N211-074

Description

By adapting energy models from the utility industry, NAVSEA can create scalable energy models and meet CBM and RBM objectives.  Maplewell’s Energy Management Control System (EMCS) monitors energy consumption and production, and energy models capture mechanical, electrical, material, and chemical problems and diagnose the condition of an asset or system.  The EMCS harnesses energy models to monitor performance “degradation” and empowers decision makers to apply the correct maintenance strategies; decreased energy performance correlates with decreased reliability, resiliency, and efficiency.  The EMCS solution also provides secure data transfer and a flexible communication interface with the Navy ERM; the EMCS acts as a supervisory control that pushes data to an “edge controller” for dynamic data processing and predictive control and then to the Cloud.  Maplewell’s EMCS solution improves reliability at the asset level, builds resiliency at the system level, and ultimately improves fleet efficiency at the ship level.  The EMCS architecture moves beyond reliability functions set by design standards, OEM recommendations, and standard maintenance methods; it integrates each asset’s distinctive energy model and reliability function signature and defines their impact on performance and reliability. With an EMCS, energy models can quantify the degradation by creating a digital twin of an asset, system, or ship that operating equipment uses as a reference for improvement; the EMCS also characterizes the reliability function and determines the effect of maintenance on reliability.  Our model-based approach builds resiliency by enabling benchmarking to compare and identify relative performance and risk at the system level.  Comparing relative performance between energy models of the same assets, systems, and ships identifies needs for maintenance or upgrades and enables shipyards to shift from reactive maintenance to predictive work packages.  The EMCS also builds resiliency by defining and tracking the reliability function to quantify the risk of system failure, manage risk with maintenance, and improve upon standard practices.  Changes in a ship’s mission and function also affect efficiency and cause a ship to operate outside of its intended design. By monitoring the ship’s systems (i.e., the power cycle), the EMCS can identify degradations in performance and capture longer-term trends for analysis to improve fleet efficiency and suggest new design standards. For the Phase 1 Option, Maplewell proposes a game theory approach to optimize maintenance for CBM and RBM.  With well-defined energy models, simulations can improve maintenance programs, predict outcomes, and forecast opportunistic maintenance to the shipyard; game theory can find the optimal solution of cost, reliability, and performance for maintenance scheduling.  Ultimately, Maplewell’s EMCS solution will create a well-defined CBM and RBM program with an optimized balance of cost and reliability.