Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
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The Navy's Smart Ship technology may not be as smart as the service
contends.
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.
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.
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.
Not officially
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.
"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 SurfaceForce, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Hauled in
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."
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.
"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.
"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."
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."
"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." |
