Shipboard Lighting System

The development of a ship wide integrated, modular, divisible, flexible, and fully distributed lighting control system will create significant construction and manpower savings in shipboard applications, while at the same time enabling US Navy vessels to meet new high temp operations that employ rapidly re-configurable lighting technologies successfully and safely. The proposed system will enable single point of control of ship-wide lighting configuration changes as required from normal lighting to darken ship or to NVD. In Phase I C3I Inc of Hampton demonstrated the feasibility of an Advanced Lgihting System (ALS) Capable of meeting these requirements. This base control was developed and tested on board the USS SeaFighter. The individual control modules containing the flexible addres structure, communicaton algorithms, control algorithms, and the design of various lighting technology drivers were built and integrated into the ALS. A Visual Landing Aid (VLA) Graphical user interface was designed and demonstrated. For this Phase II project, C3I Inc will pursue the advanced development and testing of the prototype architecture and equipment and will add several new lighting control and lighting driver capabilities, and add the capability to add other related, but not necessarily lighting technologies, to the system. The designs will be optimized, fabricated, engineered for full scale production, fully tested and made ready for full DoN shipboard operational applicaton. The completed designs will be verified and validated, and made ready for turnkey shipboard installations. Several new GUI capabilities will be added, including the ability to add pages to the control system without the requirement to re-code the software. This capability will provide the ship configuration manager the ability to maintain the configuration of the vessels lighting system in-house.