- The Navy's Smart Ship technology may
not be as smart as the service contends.
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- Although PCs have reduced workloads for
sailors aboard the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown, software glitches
resulted in system failures and crippled ship operations, according to
Navy officials.
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- Navy brass have called the Yorktown Smart
Ship pilot a success in reducing manpower, maintenance and costs. The Navy
began running shipboard applications under Microsoft Windows NT so that
fewer sailors would be needed to control key ship functions.
-
- But the Navy last fall learned a difficult
lesson about automation: The very information technology on which the ships
depend also makes them vulnerable. The Yorktown last September suffered
a systems failure when bad data was fed into its computers during maneuvers
off the coast of Cape Charles, Va.
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- The ship had to be towed into the Naval
base at Norfolk, Va., because a database overflow caused its propulsion
system to fail, according to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with
the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk.
-
- "We are putting equipment in the
engine room that we cannot maintain and, when it fails, results in a critical
failure," DiGiorgio said. It took two days of pierside maintenance
to fix the problem.
-
- The Yorktown has been towed into port
after other systems failures, he said.
-
- "An engineering local area network
casualty"
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- Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged
that the Yorktown last September experienced what they termed "an
engineering local area network casualty," but denied that the ship's
systems failure lasted as long as DiGiorgio said. The Yorktown was dead
in the water for about two hours and 45 minutes, fleet officials said,
and did not have to be towed in.
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- "This is the only time this casualty
has occurred and the only propulsion casualty involved with the control
system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was frozen,"
Vice Adm. Henry Giffin, commander of the Atlantic Fleet's Naval Surface
Force, reported in an Oct. 24, 1997, memorandum.
-
- Giffin wrote the memo to describe "what
really happened in hope of clearing the scuttlebutt" surrounding the
incident, he noted.
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- The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion
system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero,
the memo said. The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator
entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program.
That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature
remote terminal units, the memo said.
-
- The program administrators are trained
to bypass a bad data field and change the value if such a problem occurs
again, Atlantic Fleet officials said.
-
- But "the Yorktown's failure in September
1997 was not as simple as reported," DiGiorgio said.
-
- "If you understand computers, you
know that a computer normally is immune to the character of the data it
processes," he wrote in the June U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings
Magazine. "Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when
you try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next
set of instructions. It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not
designed to tolerate such a simple failure."
-
- The Navy reduced the Yorktown crew by
10 percent and saved more than $2.8 million a year using the computers.
The ship uses dual 200-MHz Pentium Pros from Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville,
Ala. The PCs and server run NT 4.0 over a high-speed, fiber-optic LAN.
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- Blame It On The OS
-
- But according to DiGiorgio, who in an
interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships
for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's
computer problems.
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- NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide
damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the
engines and navigate the ship when under way.
-
- "Using Windows NT, which is known
to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck
will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
-
- Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March
1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both networks and PCs as part
of the Navy's Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Current
guidance approved by the Navy's chief information officer calls for all
new applications to run under NT.
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- Ron Redman, deputy technical director
of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office,
said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard
the Yorktown.
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- "Refining that is an ongoing process,"
Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and
machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information
and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have
had shutdowns that resulted from NT."
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- Yorktown Towed Into Port Several Times
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- The Yorktown has been towed into port
several times because of the systems failures, he said.
-
- "Because of politics, some things
are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do,
like Windows NT," Redman said. "If it were up to me I probably
would not have used Windows NT in this particular application. If we used
Unix, we would have a system that has less of a tendency to go down."
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- Although Unix is more reliable, Redman
said, NT may become more reliable with time.
-
- The Navy is moving the service's command
and control applications from Unix to NT as part of IT-21. Under IT-21,
the Navy also plans to modernize ships in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets
with asynchronous transfer mode LANs. Large ATM networks running NT have
already been installed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Essex.
-
- But DiGiorgio said the LANs might experience
a chain reaction of computer failures like those experienced on the Yorktown.
That domino effect is inherent to the system design of shipboard LANs,
he said.
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- "There is very little segregation
of error when software shares bad data," DiGiorgio said. "Instead
of one computer knocking off on the Yorktown, they all did, one after the
other. What if this happened in actual combat?"
-
- Although the Yorktown did not have backup
systems, Redman said that future Smart Ships will have systems redundancy
to ensure that ships can continue to operate.
-
- But DiGiorgio said that the Smart Ship
project needs to do more engineering up front.
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- "Installing a control system on
a warship and resolving problems as the project progresses is a costly
and naive process," DiGiorgio wrote in the Proceedings article. "Now,
with the top people rotated off the Smart Ship Project, it would be wise
for the Navy to investigate this fiasco more fully."
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- Redman has a different perspective. "If
it were me, I wouldn't say all the things that Tony [DiGiorgio] has said
out of discretion and consideration for being a long-term employee,"
he said. "But I will say this about Tony, he's a very bright engineer."
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- "Everybody plays the obedience role
where you cannot criticize the system," said DiGiorgio, a self-described
whistle-blower. "I'm not that kind of guy."
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