Northrop Grumman [NOC] this week said its entry into a next-generation biological detection program that would provide faster alerts to public safety authorities than the current system has successfully completed field testing.
Now the company is preparing to enter into the next phase of the BioWatch Generation-3 program, which is expected to result in the selection of at least one contractor for further work leading to an operational test and evaluation phase followed by a production decision. The Department of Homeland Security plans to release a Request for Proposals during the third quarter of 2012 for Phase II of the Gen-3 program.
The field tests of Northrop Grumman’s Next Generation Automated Detection System (NG-ADS) took place in indoor and outdoor locations in Chicago and began in January 2011, lasting for just over a year. During the testing, over 20,000 samples were collected and analyzed and the systems operated 24/7.
“So we went through the total cycle of the environmental extremes,” Dave Tilles, director of Homeland Security Programs for Northrop Grumman’s Electronic Systems sector, told Defense Daily yesterday. “In general,” he said the NG-ADS units that were deployed worked well, adding that some issues that cropped up were “minor” and have been corrected.
The system is “ready for the next phase,” Tilles said.
During the field-testing, which was managed by the Office of Health Affairs (OHA) within DHS, the department awarded several engineering change proposals to Northrop Grumman to improve the efficiency of the air collector and the optical reading component of the assay.
In a press release on Tuesday, Northrop Grumman said that since the field test it has made improvements to the NG-ADS to enhance system performance and reduce life-cycle costs.
The current BioWatch system consists of aerosol collectors and samplers that are deployed at over 30 major urban areas around the country. The samples are taken daily to local laboratories for analysis to check for the presence of bio-hazards in the local environment. The process is manually intensive and creates a lengthy lag between sample collection and processing, shortening the window for public health authorities to take action in response to a threat from a biological agent such as anthrax.
With the Gen-3 program, DHS expects to significantly reduce the time between sample collection and alerting by automating the process in each deployable unit and having the results automatically reported via a communications network to the proper officials.
Northrop Grumman was the only contractor to make it to the field testing stage of the Gen-3 Phase I effort. United Technologies’ [UTX] Hamilton Sundstrand division also participated in the opening phase but did not advance to the field tests. Other companies were involved at earlier stages of the program but were let go as their technologies failed to meet OHA’s requirements.
During the field testing, the NG-ADS units were designed to operate for at least a week without the need for manual maintenance or checks to replace consumables and perform other tasks. The expected requirement for the production Gen-3 units is also a week without manual checks with a threshold requirement of up to one month.
The system has built in diagnostics that are automatically communicated to the user community in case a system needs to be checked or serviced, Jon Lunglhofer, Northrop Grumman’s BioWatch program manager, told Defense Daily.
The life-cycle costs of the Gen-3 system are currently estimated at $5.7 billion (Defense Daily, March 30). Congress has been concerned over repeated delays in the program, largely due to the difficulty in developing the technology, which would represent a dramatic advance over existing systems if it works.
DHS has opted for a go-slow approach in developing and testing the Gen-3 systemsto buy down risk.
Northrop Grumman is teamed with Luminex [LMNX], a life sciences firm that provides the detection technology that is part of NG-ADS.