Leonardo to provide information management software for RAN submarines

Maritime October 13, 2017

Leonardo has secured a contract with the Commonwealth of Australia’s Department of Defence to provide Information Management software to six Collins-class submarines operated by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN).

The Submarine Communication Information Exchange Management (SCIEM) contract is part of Australia’s Project SEA1439 Phase 5B2 upgrade programme.

Leonardo will be providing its SmartIDMS™ software application, that is designed and manufactured in the UK and will allow RAN crews to upload and download data when the submarine connects to a network.

Submarines share information over computer networks but because they spend a great deal of time deep underwater, they are cut off from their networks for long periods.

In order to stay in contact, a submarine must rise to just below the sea surface (‘periscope depth’) in order to join the network and exchange data with the outside world.

Traditionally, the data would be uploaded and downloaded in the order that it was stored, which has led to important information getting stuck in a queue potentially behind large, low-priority files.

Leonardo’s SmartIDMS™ system optimises this process by intelligently choosing which information to send and receive first and which can wait, for example prioritising operating orders over personal emails.

Different rules can be pre-set for different missions, so that during peacetime, for instance, improving crewmember morale can be easily achieved by raising the priority of welfare communications with their friends and families.

The software also provides significant improvements in the capabilities of any communications network. The most obvious, for submarines, are the effective management of information dissemination and the bandwidth optimisation, resulting in time and cost savings of typically over 80%.

Another key advantage of the system is that other network users will see a virtual submarine that is always present on the network, even when it is disconnected, allowing them to seamlessly move data onto the submarine, which will then be synchronised when the real submarine re-connects to the network.

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Leonardo RAN Royal Australian Navy