QUALTECH SYSTEMS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N141-030

Description

The performance information contained in SMARTS and/or SolarWinds is not currently used to improve the uptime of the computer systems they are running on, or to help in quickly troubleshooting system faults/failures. In addition, due to limited size, current troubleshooting sessions are conducted between fleet crew onboard the LCS and SMEs on-shore using voice, email, and Secure Internet Protocols Router Network chat. This increases the workload of fleet crew because of the iterative back-and-forth nature of email-based troubleshooting or the burden of having to schedule and execute a chat session. Most importantly, it is primarily all reactive maintenance and follows the traditional break-fix model leading to perceived lack of reliability, significant operational downtime and hence decreased availability.Qualtech Systems, Inc., in collaboration with Lockheed Martin, intends to address the challenges by enhancing/integrating/fielding QSIs Integrated Diagnostic Solution Suite that work with data from SMARTS and/or SolarWinds within MPCE. The key innovative aspects of the QSI-LM team solution approach are (1) diagnosis before dispatch, (2) m2m (machine-to-machine) capability, (3) trending capability (i.e., time-to-alarm (TTA) and time-to-maintenance (TTM)), (4) remote diagnosis via a server on-shore, (5) diagnostic state information to SMEs on-shore, and (6) support fleet maintenance crew to rapidly troubleshoot problems. The proposed solution approach will result in increased operational availability and reduced maintenance cost (and time) by building a seamless proactive sense anticipate and respond system (When-Then Rules) with CBM capability that would interface with SMARTS and/or SolarWinds data.