FRESH: an expert system at the Pacific Fleet headquarters
In August 1986 Texas Instruments and btg delivered to the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief, US Pacific Fleet, at Pearl Harbor the first prototype of FRESH, an expert system that tracks the status and employment of ships and helps plan their use. DARPA's budget of February 1987 says the prototype is installed and demonstrated at the headquarters along with a natural language interface.
Why it matters
The battle management demonstration promised by the Strategic Computing plan reached a real fleet command centre rather than a laboratory. According to a Naval Postgraduate School thesis, by the late fall of 1987 the system was considered operational, though with limited capability, and the command centre estimated that the manpower and time these calculations needed fell to between a quarter and a twelfth of those of manual methods.
FRESH belongs to the Fleet Command Center Battle Management Project (FCCBMP). Knowledge engineering with the headquarters staff began in fiscal 1986; by DARPA's 1987 budget, work had started on CASES, which assesses force capabilities, the second of the project's five expert systems. The system tracks almost three hundred ships. It was built by rapid prototyping, with a knowledge engineer on site and a development group in Dallas. Discrepancies: DARPA expands FRESH as Force Readiness Expert System, the thesis as Force Requirements; DARPA speaks of five expert systems in the project, the thesis of four. What the record does not claim: the estimate of saved manpower and time as a measurement, since it is the command centre's estimate as the thesis reports it, not a test report. The thesis is the work of an officer who studied the system, not a programme document; no report of DARPA's or the Navy's own on FRESH was found.