Contract extension covers maintenance system development for Navy's MK 99 FCS
NewsJuly 11, 2018
PRINCETON, N.J. U.S. Navy officials extend a contract with Mikros Systems Corp. to continue to develop to Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) systems for the Navy?s MK 99 Fire Control System (FCS). The follow-on contract is worth $2.5 million.
Mikros is developing a new variant of its ADSSS system, an advanced network-based remote monitoring and maintenance system which collects performance data in real-time and uses it to detect and predict failures. The ADSSS system, which recently received official Navy nomenclature as the AN/SYM-3, is currently used on the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to monitor two other radars and combat system elements.
The new variant of the SYM-3, which will monitor the Director in the MK 99 system, has been in development since 2017. The new contract award covers continued development, at-sea testing, and validation of the system. Under this contract, Mikros’ CBM technology will be used for the first time in the Navy’s Aegis surface combatant fleet of destroyers and cruisers.
“We’ve been working on the Aegis variant system for over a year now and have had encouraging results from preliminary land-based testing. We’ll be performing the first shipboard testing this summer as part of the Navy’s annual FLEX/RIMPAC exercise,” says Mikros Program Manager Jason Hodge. “The Aegis community has been using our AN/PSM-132 system for preventative maintenance on the SPY-1 radar for several years. This contract will allow us to complete development and testing of the new systems with the ultimate goal of large scale production to serve the Aegis class ships.”
The program will apply both model-based Prognostics Framework technology to detect and predict failures on each ship, and “big data” predictive analytics on-shore using a machine learning approach to analyze data from all ships and detect large-scale trends, patterns and anomalies.
