The two-stage recurrent neural network is being
developed by a company called decisionLab and is being
sponsored by Joint Forces Command and funded by the
MOD’s Defence Innovation Fund through the Defence and
Security Accelerator’s (DASA) fast track ‘Revolutionise
the human information relationship for Defence’
competition.
Originally developed for the civilian aviation market,
this research funding has enabled the product to be
redeveloped to be suitable for the military market.
It’s hoped it will in time provide an insight into the
future, allowing maintenance engineers to view the
status of their systems and the predicted health of
that system a day, week, or even a fortnight in
advance.
Gripped by this opportunity, the Royal Navy has
invested £150,000 in the development of this neural
network for exploitation on-board a Type 45 destroyer,
and pull through onto the Type 26 – if proven
successful.
A Royal Navy ship is incredibly complex, and the Type
45’s systems can record 10 million data points a day.
With such a huge and complex dataset, the type of
machine learning offered by the neural network will
likely have a significant impact on maintenance
schedules and support, improving capability, saving
money and delivering efficiency.
At present, decisionLab is training their neural
network on 1.8 billion lines of Type 45 Platform
Management System data. Each day the system gets
smarter and more capable, and under current development
plans this system will be installed onboard HMS DIAMOND
for a trial in the summer. It will allow the user to
validate system assumptions and help contextualise
events to further train and improve the model.
Lee Packer, Innovation Programme Manager for the Royal
Navy said –
“The Defence and Security Accelerator competitions
provide the Royal Navy with a unique opportunity to
both engage with a broad spectrum of small to medium
sized enterprises whom are often new to the Defence
market, and to grip technological opportunities from
disruptive markets and apply them to Defence problems.
This rapid development process, with collaboration at
its core, will provide battle-winning capabilities to
the hands of the user.”
Joe Hemming, Exploitation Lead for DASA said –
“This is a clear demonstration of the cultural shift
across all organisations to focus on capability
integration and exploitation as well as technology
development. This project is a great example of
collaboration between DASA, the competition sponsors
(Joint Force Command) and the front lines working hard
to turn technology into true capability.
The Navy’s commitment to integrate the DecisionLabs
project onto existing architecture will help provide an
accurate value proposition for future procurement
across the maritime capability and possibly beyond.”
About the competition
The ‘Revolutionise the human information relationship
for Defence’ competition was the first competition
launched since the start of DASA in December 2016. 34
projects were awarded funding with decisionLab being 1
of 7 to receive phase 1 fast track funding under
Challenge 2. In October 2017, DecisionLab was one of
two companies to successfully progress to Phase 2 to
continue their development of their neural network
system.
