Damage Control System

The Damage Control System has been developed for a Navy ship using Dr. DWG's skills in Graphics and Networking.

The Problem
In wartime, when any part of a navy ship is damaged, different types of actions need to be carried out by different people acting in coordination. For each person, doing his task correctly, and coordinating it with others' activities is of critical importance. In a large ship with specialized teams, this is best done if precise information on damages (and the damage control activities) in various parts of the ship is made available to key individuals. Simultaneously, clear guidelines on the action to take for each type of hazard should be provided to these individual. Only then will the sum of all individual actions lead to maximum overall effectiveness and efficiency.

Dr. DWG's Solution
Dr. DWG provided a real time information system for a Navy ship, for providing damage and damage control activities' information to key individuals in the ship. The best way to provide this was through a graphical interface showing an isometric view of the ship's drawings. The drawing was split into several levels, showing individual compartments. For each compartment, callout blocks and symbols would show the state of damage and the control activities. A user can add a damage by choosing the appropriate symbol and simply clicking on the compartment. This information is transmitted in real time to 30 other systems within the ship and shown immediately in the display. For each damage control activity taking place, different views are shown, showing the detailed damage status of the compartments.

The user is also provided a checklist of things to be done by various people for each damage. As a person completes a task, he clicks on that checklist item and it immediately greys out, showing the time completed. All other users too immediately get to see these and can coordinate their actions accordingly. All activities and damage statuses are logged into a database. The user can see all information regarding various parts of the ship by zooming into the drawing, by seeing various systems such as the air ducts, which are provided, as overlays. By simply clicking on a compartment, all equipment in it is shown, which is drawing from a database.

Technology
The Dr. DWG LiteView AutoCAD viewer was used to display the ship's views, with zooming and overlay features. Dr. DWG being the fastest viewer in the world loaded the 9MB drawing in no time. Its redlining and hyperlinking features were customized to allow the user to define any region as a compartment with an ID that linked that region to the database. The redlining was further customized to show damage states. Advanced graphics algorithms were used to automatically place damage symbols without overlap. Real time networking concepts were used to transmit these damages redlining symbols to all computers in a fault tolerant manner - meeting the stringent performance criteria of the Navy.