AUTOMATED CONTINGENCY PLANNING IN SUPPORT OF SHIPBOARD DAMAGE CONTROL

Abstract

ABSTRACTShipboard damage control is almost totally reliant upon manual means for information processing and suffers from additional problems involving an ad hoc approach to casualty control, the need to condense highly specific useful information from general documentation (e.g., fire boundaries), and the variety, complexity and sometimes unavailability of required information (e.g., booklets of general plans which open out to the size of a large table; isometric diagrams each with their own sets of symbology; electrical distribution data contained on hundreds of aperture cards). A prototype computer system called SNIPE (Standard Naval Information Program — Engineering) was installed aboard USS Peterson (DD‐969) in April 1985 using an IBM micro‐processor. SNIPE uses contingency planning concepts to define the fire doctrine for every space on the ship. Thus, when a fire location is entered into the computer, SNIPE advises the ship's damage control personnel of the following predetermined information: the closest fire‐fighting equipment, fire boundaries to set, nearby hazards (e.g., magazines), vent systems and closures to secure, other spaces served by common vent systems to be checked, and electrical circuits to be secured. Computer disk “pre‐positioned” messages directing repair party action can also be printed for any of the above actions, speeding up the damage control central message output process. This paper describes the firefighting system in use aboard USS Peterson, the day‐to‐day readiness monitoring capabilities of the system, and some of the planned future enhancements.