Security Enhancement of Littoral Combat Ship Class Utilizing an Autonomous Mustering and Pier Monitoring System
Abstract
Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) are designed and built to have minimum crew sizes thus, while the ship is in port, there are fewer crewmembers to facilitate pier monitoring, security, and conducting mustering of personnel. The crew of LCS ships presently have too many responsibilities to ensure 100% coverage of the Pier area 100% of the time, and cannot manually maintain a real time muster of all ships personnel. This lack of coverage and situational awareness could make LCS ships vulnerable to terrorist attacks or terrorist monitoring. This thesis addresses the capability gap for complete and automated personnel mustering and situational awareness in the pier area for LCS class ships. Through applying the Systems Engineering process, the concept, external systems diagram, requirements, and functional architectures for a generic solution are proposed. The proposed solution is an autonomous system utilizing facial recognition software to maintain a muster of the ship's crew, while in parallel monitoring the pier area, looking for any known person of interest (e.g., terrorists) and providing appropriate alerts. Additionally, this thesis provides a demonstrable proof-of-concept prototype system solution, named Pier Watchman. Its instantiated physical architecture of a specific autonomous solution to pier monitoring and personnel mustering is provided.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA518711
Entities
People
- Philip N. Stubblefield
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School