CANES, the U.S. Navy's Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services program, continued to successfully achieve key milestones as Northrop Grumman, one of two contractors working on the CANES system design, completed its Critical Design Review (CDR) May 13.

CANES will streamline and update shipboard, submarine and shore-based command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) network systems to increase capability and affordability across the fleet.

The two-day review, conducted at Northrop Grumman's CANES program office in San Diego, served as a forum for the Navy, Northrop Grumman and its teammates to share technical information and ensured the Navy's system design requirements are met prior to entering final system integration and test. The CDR and subsequent completion of the CANES system tests are important events leading up to the planned shipboard installation of the first system in fiscal year 2012.

Huntington Ingalls Industries is Northrop Grumman's major platform integration and installation partner on CANES. The team also includes key small business partners Atlas Technologies, Beatty and Company Computing, Juno Technologies, Mikros Systems Corporation, Syzygy Technologies and CenterBeam.

On Jan. 10, 2011, CANES received Milestone B approval, validating the program's ability to meet key cost, schedule and performance criteria.

"The Northrop Grumman team is poised to proceed quickly into final CANES system integration and test," said Mike Twyman, vice president for Integrated Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Systems for Northrop Grumman's Information Systems sector. "Our strategy includes the application of open-systems architecture, the ability to integrate C4I applications, and the capability to accelerate installation on U.S. Navy platforms.

"The Navy and Northrop Grumman have mutual goals: To rapidly deliver the best C4I capabilities to our warfighters while minimizing acquisition and life-cycle costs. Northrop Grumman feels confident that our solution developed using our MOSA-CTM process provides a modular, scalable, and easy to operate and maintain solution for our sailors."

Northrop Grumman's Modular Open Systems Approach-CompetitiveTM approach is a strategic business and engineering process that realizes the life-cycle benefits of open-systems architecture and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and software. Applying MOSA-CTM, the company has been able to verify "plug-and-play" modularity through extensive testing and demonstrated the ability of multiple COTS and open-source products to meet CANES current and future requirements.

Since COTS, open-source and third-party products can be "plugged in" without costly software and interface rework, development and production costs are kept to a minimum through continuous competition. The enduring architecture design of the approach addresses future technology evolution to readily accommodate new mission requirements and technology insertion.

CANES is the consolidation and enhancement of multiple legacy C4I network programs. It will also provide the common computing environment infrastructure for C4I applications that currently require system specific infrastructure to operate legacy systems.

Northrop Grumman received a $17.4 million contract, one of two CANES Common Computing Environment system development contracts awarded by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, San Diego, on March 4, 2010, on behalf of Program Executive Office C4I, Tactical Networks Program Office.

The Navy is expected to down-select to a single CANES design for system production late this year.

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