Naval ships today not only are highly capablevessels, they also are multi-faceted andimmensely complicated information systems.Recognizing this, Navantia (www.navantia.es), aleading military shipbuilder based in Spain, haseffectively differentiated itself in its industry bydeveloping and deploying the next generation ofship management systems – what Navantia callsits Integrated Platform Management System(IPMS).The key to Navantia’s advanced IPMS is abreakthrough software application, called COM-PLEX, that the company and its developmentpartner, Arisnova, built using InterSystems’Caché object database. COMPLEX enables inte-gration of standard functions like ship controland supervision with other advanced functionssuch as damage control, maintenance, on-boardtraining and more, in part by extracting informa-tion from the shipyard’s design and constructiondata (drawings, specs and spreadsheets) to

enhance the onboard operational systems.Currently Navantia has IPMS projects under wayfor the Spanish, Norwegian, Venezuelan andAustralian navies.“We have been able to develop a better sys-tem than anybody else in the world,” says JuanLuis Muñoz, Technical Director at Navantia’sControl Systems Department. “It differentiatesus from all competitors. In some cases Navantiahas been able to sell ships thanks specifically toour integrated ship information system; some-times it has been more important than the shipitself.”IPMS is a distributed real-time digital controlsystem. It comprises multifunction control con-soles and a set of PLCs (programmable logic con-trollers) used for data acquisition and control.The consoles provide human-machine interfaces(HMIs) for system operators at various ship-board locations. System-wide connectivity isprovided by redundant networking. IPMS has an

Navantia Develops Next Wave of Ship ManagementSystems Using InterSystems CachéAdaptable �

Rich data model to represent objects �

High performance for event processing �

Navantia

INTERSYSTEMS CACHÉ CASE STUDY

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open architecture that readily accommodatesintegration of all types of additional sub-systems(and their respective software) so that all canoperate under the same information framework.The resulting functionality yields significantsavings in installation, purchasing and mainte-nance costs.Navantia began looking at alternatives totraditional relational databases and SCADA(Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition)systems because of limitations that make thoseapproaches inadequate for a high-performanceIPMS. Their data models are too simplistic, theirarchitectures too inflexible, and their perform-ance too limited for an IPMS that must accommo-date multiple sensors, various types of shipboardequipment, systems relationships, process work-flow, and diverse types of information: static,dynamic, real-time, active and historical.After reviewing their options, Navantia choseInterSystems Caché as the software foundationfor COMPLEX for several reasons. “Caché’s datasynchronization and replication capabilities arekeys to deploying distributed control applica-tions,” Muñoz says. “Also, COMPLEX is a multi-platform solution capable of running bothWindows and Linux applications, so we needed adatabase engine that offered the same. Caché’sexcellent access speed allows queries in real timefor generation of contextual menus or reportson-the-fly. And Caché’s access speed and mas-sive storage capacity allow real-time data to beincorporated into the historical database withoutdegrading application performance.”In addition, Caché enables one of the mostdramatic and visual features of COMPLEX: anintegrated display environment that presentsinformation to ship operators in three differentcomplementary views:

� A two-dimensional schematic, offering asimplified functional overview of systems;� A three-dimensional detailed view,providing the exact geographical location ofelements inside ship compartments, withzoom, pan and rotation capability; and� A “data exploring” view, displaying datasheets about shipboard equipment andsystems along with powerful tools forfiltering and searching any kind ofinformationOther attributes of COMPLEX that derive fromits Caché core include high system throughput,which now extends to 65,000 signals. Also,COMPLEX provides linear expansion so that theuser base can grow easily as needs change, withno additional development. Also, the reusabilityof COMPLEX reduces by 80 percent the numberof development hours required to implementnew IPMS projects.While COMPLEX already is a leadership IPMS,Navantia has ambitious plans. “Going forward,we plan to compile ship operations data in a bigCaché database and let equipment maintenanceexperts access it so they can improve equipmentdesign and maintenance regimens,” Muñoz says.“Also we plan to create a simulated ship trainingsystem for educating equipment maintenancepersonnel.”“Caché is by far the most significant enablingcore technology in COMPLEX to achieve all ourpresent and future requirements,” Muñozconcludes.