When a mission critical naval vessel is operating in dangerous waters or in battle, amongst other things, the success of its mission is a measure of capability and availability of its Weapon Systems, Combat and Communications Systems, Battle Damage Control System (BDCS) and Situational Awareness, as well as, its ability to recover from unplanned incidents. The next Generation Integrated Platform Management Systems (IPMS) for Autonomous Ships with much reduced manning, dictates special considerations for autonomous control systems across the ship support systems and beyond without need for man-in-the-loop for decision making. This entails detailed analysis, vulnerability and recoverability assessments during target ship’s basic design and the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) where available. The optimum strategy involves consideration of distributed smart agent based control and monitoring systems that shall react rapidly to changes in operational demands and incidents without the need for man-in-the-loop, creating BDCS dynamic kill cards across ship subsystems and, extending the IPMS BDCS capabilities to Combat Management. The above gives rise to consideration of “Flinch Technology (FT)” [7]. It implies distributed smart agent based control systems that instinctively reacts to incidents for fast recoverability in the event of damage to supervisory control system (i.e. IPMS) and its related data communication network. This paper addresses the benefits that might be gained as a result of consideration of smart agent based control systems with no manin-the loop involvement for decision making. Such technology solutions, empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be adopted in the future Autonomous Combatant Ships.
Impact of Flinch Technology on Damage Control and Survivability