Land Force: MPAS: Data for the force | ADM Mar 2011
Nick Lee-Frampton | Wellington
Given that air power originated with providing information for people on the surface as to what was over the horizon, it could be argued that the Integrated Mission Support Squadron (IMSS) is not doing anything new with what it calls Project Mission Planning and Analysis System (MPAS).
Wing Commander Brendon Pett told ADM that the MPAS is ‘basically a computer network that is linked in to a storage array that allows us to upload and download mission data to all 15 of the P-3K2 Orion’s hard-drives.’
WGCDR Pett, who commands the IMSS at Whenuapai, Auckland, describes MPAS as a ‘mechanism that we use to upload all the mission data that we need pre-flight and then take out all the information from those 15 hard-drives post-flight for subsequent analysis, processing and fowarding to Headquarters Joint Force NZ.’
MPAS, said WGCDR Pett, is not only for military use.
“We process that data and put it out to both the NZ Defence Force (NZDF) network and the wider government network too.
“It really is a whole of NZDF project. We are in the driver’s seat because we raised it up and Wellington said it is a bloody good idea and gave us the power to press ahead and do it on behalf of the NZDF.”
The project had its genesis when people from the RNZAF, all the way from the P-3K2 project team and Ministry of Defence personnel, through to people at Whenuapai who understood the aircraft and realised there is great potential for the greater exploitation of the range of information that the Orions collect
“We realised that the Orion itself collects thousands of pieces of information, from fuel burn and oil temperatures and how many times something was turned on and off, all the way down to images and the data it collects from the sensors,” WGCDR Pett said.
“It would be almost criminal not to have all this information available for people to use, be it logisticians to look at Mean Time Between Failure rates and for our engineers to look at different aspects of the flight cycle through to the Intelligence cell having that information available for anyone,” WGCDR Pett explained.
“We had the flexibility to put a project together, we submitted it to the wider defence community and said we would like to see if we could develop something, a web based interface that would enable people easily to access that information.
“It is an extension of the support network for the P-3K2 and is the natural solution and access portal through which others access that information.
“So we kicked the project off, the guys did some work, they started to develop an interface and using web technology we learned that there is a whole raft of information out there that is uniquely linked in the P-3.
“We realised we could make a wide range of data available to users, so we did some trials and recognised we could make it work, that we could tailor it to a variety of different users so the next phase is actually procuring hardware to actually store the data and make it searchable and retrievable in a user friendly way.”
WGCDR Pett described the objective as a ‘data warehouse’ that was accessible to all RNZDF personnel that needed it with the potential to serve other related agencies such as Police, Customs, Fisheries and particularly the National Maritime Coordination Centre. MPAS is aiming to be a powerful whole of government tool.
“The agencies have been given a briefing as to its potential. Once this is up and running and we can show the information and the value we can provide, we hope to get the other Government agencies to use it and share and link information with them as well.”
In terms of timing for the project, work is coming together right now.
“We are in the middle of sorting out what is the technology we require, what is the hardware?” WGCDR Pett said. “We are asking potential users to tell us what they need and that will define the technology. We want to have the system up and running ha so we can run some trials by July so we can further develop the search engine.
“At this stage we have a prototype front-end and a software application tool to really do the work, so we are just at the hardware phase really, which is to some extent the simplest part of it, then we will be refining that search engine. We have already run some demonstrations of what can be done.”
Challenges
Like any IT based project which requires not only hardware and software, but a change in how people access and use information, there are challenges to be faced from the outset.
“We are reasonably confident that it is a good tool and the biggest challenge might be coping with all the information,” WGCDR Pett said. “A lot of it will be educating people as to what is available, a lot of it depends on having a P-3 available to go out there and collect [the data] and getting it in there and then it’s a matter of ongoing refinement.
“Probably the biggest change will be linking other networks to it. It will depend on how we bring in other information that is not P-3K2 unique. That will always be a challenge, but if we do it in small steps with each agency can minimise those risks where possible.
And WGCDR Pett says NZ Defence is not alone in seeing the benefit that MPAS can offer.
“It’s a collaborative effort; we have the NZDF, Beca Applied Technology, the Joint Command and Control System people — they are excited by the opportunity it will provide.
“It truly is a collaborative effort across the NZDF and there are a lot of key stakeholders who are involved to one degree or another, whether it’s purely consultation and making sure what we doing is not wasting resources and watching where we are going.
“We are developing tools that will work in combination with each other. There doesn’t need to be hardware loaded [on to the P-3K2] as we are simply extracting the data, all the imagery, all the information the aircraft will collect on its hard drives.”
The export potential of the MPAS system as also not gone unnoticed.
“The way we can really show the rest of the world is if we can collect it in and share it with all the other information from the other agencies and our sister services, I think that is where we can show real potential to support the wider international community,” WGCDR Pett said.
“I think it could be a very powerful tool that a lot of agencies would be very interested in and the value we could add to the wider international community, including helping law enforcement – US Coastguard, Australian Customs and Police, for example — that it would be a useful tool and internationally have huge potential to support our partners.
“The potential is huge for streamlining supply and management; the logistics folk have done a lot of work to streamline supply train management and this would be another tool to help them manage it.”
The project is also making use of Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) hardware to keep costs and risk to a minimum.
“We are also utilising Beca to keep an eye on what is going on in the commercial world,” WGCDR Pett said. “The tools and the interface are based around current technology trends and software.”
Squadron Leader Harley James, commanding the software and simulation side of IMSS, told ADM that there is far more to MPAS ‘than the intelligence part.’
“It will help with fatigue management and engine maintenance ... enabling maintainers to identify potential issues before they occur in flight,” SQNLDR James said. “That sort of information is invaluable.”
And on land
The NZ Army is also interested in the information linkages that the MPAS project can provide.
“We have spoken to the Army community around general ideas and supporting MPAS, but the whole concept of what we are doing is future proofing,” SQNLDR James said. “So it wouldn’t matter where the Army went, or the Air Force, or anyone else, we would still be able to link in all the information.
“I expect the [Army‘s UAV] Kahu would be like the P-3 in that post-mission the data would go in to the MPAS network. I guess what information came over the bird in-flight could also potentially go in there, but Army would also be a user of our information.
“In a few years time with a P-3 say, in Afghanistan and it starts surveillance to give support to land forces the Kahu in theatre might be able to pull up imagery helpful to their theatre and to what they are planning.
“And vice-versa, if Kahu has been operating it might be able to upload data to the P-3, or UAVs working with naval force and vice-versa. The whole idea is that it is not service centric, it is defence and government centric.”