Integration of Battle Damage Repair management in an Integrated Mission Management System

In the future, the Royal Netherlands Navy (RNLN) will face growing challenges at sea in an environment of ever increasing complexity, variety and speed. Ship systems will continue to evolve and become more interconnected. The ship’s crew will be expected to do more with fewer numbers in less available time. To be able to meet these challenges the RNLN have started the Manning & Automation roadmap to realize effective and integral support for operations on board. 
 
A critical requirement for these steps to be made is the integration of information to enable automation to integrally support the crew in their operations. On current ships, information and automation of separate systems often are not integrated and survival relies on the crew connecting the dots of an ever-increasing complexity of data. Furthermore, during incidents crews rely on paper-based systems for Battle Damage Repair management to create an overview and support the ship’s operations. These paper-based systems are slow, fault-sensitive, manpower-intensive and will potentially result in missed opportunities or critical errors, especially in a time-critical State 1 environment. 
 
The RNLN have started several projects on the Manning & Automation roadmap to develop integration and automation of the Internal and External battle into an Integrated Mission Management System. This paper will describe the current process and foreseen improvement for Battle Damage Repair management to support a more effective Internal and External Battle on ships of the RNLN with optimised crew numbers. It will demonstrate a large step in effectiveness and crew optimisation can be made by employing existing and emerging technology.