The Next Generation in Underwater Acoustic Detection

Abstract

Since the 1950s, AT&T has provided underwater detection equipment to the U. S. Navy to satisfy the navy's two-tier mission of studying the ocean and developing and testing sonar systems. The latest generation of hardware is a fiber-optic system that has the transmission capacity of all the previous systems combined. Its design and development has provided a challenge both from the technical aspect of meeting stringent performance requirements and from the engineering aspect of managing a large defense program having a budget greater than $500 million. Following a brief summary of AT&T's history in the development and manufacture of underwater acoustic detection hardware, this paper provides a technical description of the fiber-optic system and a project history describing the processes used in bringing the equipment into production. During the period of program execution (1989 to the present), systems engineering management philosophy has evolved from strict flow-down of requirements via military standards to concurrent engineering and product-realization teams. The Fixed Distributed System (FDS) project has followed the same route, partly by design and partly by necessity. It provided some valuable lessons that have been learned and incorporated into the present AT&T Advanced Technology Systems (ATS) engineering process, which has been the basis for AT&T Best Current Practices in systems engineering.