Norfolk Naval Shipyard has become the first of the US Navy’s four public shipyards to have hardware installed for the Naval Autonomous Data Collection System, or NADACS, a platform that pairs passive RFID with a GPS wireless sensor mesh to give near real time visibility of tools, equipment and material as they move around the yard. The Navy published the milestone in October 2026. Hardware installation is due to finish by June 2027, with a go live date of July 2027.
Norfolk Naval Shipyard, in Portsmouth, Virginia, is the oldest of the Navy’s four government owned shipyards and overhauls, repairs and modernises warships and submarines. The rollout runs alongside the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP), the Navy’s long running effort to rebuild the docks, buildings and layout of all four yards, with Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC) involved in the site work. NADACS itself was developed by Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP), the Navy’s logistics and supply organisation, in partnership with the contractor LMI Solutions. At Norfolk the shipyard’s Digital Transformation Department, Code 100TO.4, has driven the launch.
Two tracking layers, not one
The Navy’s description of NADACS is specific about the mix: passive RFID for identification, plus a GPS wireless sensor mesh, with the data consolidated in a secure, government owned and operated cloud environment.
Passive RFID tags carry no battery. They draw the power to reply from the reader’s radio field, which makes them cheap enough to fit to many thousands of items and maintenance free once applied. That is the right economics for a shipyard, where the population being tracked is tooling, test gear, staged material and consumables rather than a small fleet of expensive vehicles. Fixed readers and portals at building entrances and along the waterfront log each tagged item as it passes, so the location record updates with nobody scanning anything by hand. Passive tags read at those distances across an industrial site are normally UHF, in the 860 to 960 MHz RAIN RFID band, although the Navy has published no frequency for NADACS and the official copy says only passive RFID.
The GPS wireless sensor mesh is a separate and quite different layer. Those nodes are battery powered, they report position rather than waiting to be interrogated, and in the Navy’s earlier description of NADACS the mesh tags logged temperature, shock, vibration, movement and humidity. The passive tags answer where something is, cheaply and at scale. The mesh nodes answer where it is right now and what has happened to it, on a smaller number of higher value or more sensitive items.
A long run up to the waterfront
The Norfolk installation is not the start of NADACS. LMI began working with NAVSUP on it as a research and development project in 2017. Initial operational capability came in May 2021 at a NAVSUP supply site at Naval Air Station Oceana, using handheld RFID scanners, and a Navy article of July 2021 stressed that the system was deliberately hardware agnostic to avoid vendor lock in. Shipyards, Fleet Readiness Centers and 5G were all named as next steps at the time.
The implementation contract was awarded in September 2024. Task order N00189-24-F-R517 went sole source to JJR Solutions LLC of Dayton, Ohio, worth $42.4m and rising to $98.4m if all options are exercised, with the work split evenly at 25 per cent each across Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, Puget Sound and Portsmouth. Some trade coverage has described JJR as an LMI subsidiary while other outlets credited the award to LMI directly, and neither company has confirmed the relationship publicly, so it is best treated as unresolved.
The Navy’s own account notes that since that 2024 contract the aim had been to begin implementing across the four shipyards in mid 2026, with full operations planned for 2027. Norfolk is instead installing hardware through to June 2027 and going live the following month. Measured from the 2017 research start, that is close to a decade from first R&D to a working system on a shipyard waterfront, and nobody involved is pretending otherwise.
“It has been an incredibly long journey to get NADACS to a point of installing the hardware,” said Code 100TO.4 NADACS project manager David Franklin. “However, the overall NADACS journey is not over, and we still have a few more hurdles to overcome. The ground team has worked hard to work with various stakeholders to knock down roadblocks and successfully accelerate the timeline of bringing NADACS to workforce.”
What the shipyard expects to get
In August 2026 Norfolk ran what it called a Flagship Demonstration, with representatives from LMI Solutions showing the software and hardware working in real time to shipyard leadership including Shipyard Commander Rear Adm. Kavon Hakimzadeh. The demonstration tracked a tagged piece of equipment through a space on the waterfront fitted out to support the system. “We need to have a better track of our parts and equipment and NADACS will help us get there,” Hakimzadeh said.
The payoff being described is the familiar one for large site asset tracking, which is time not spent hunting. “The workforce will no longer have to spend hours, sometimes days looking for equipment and/or materials,” Franklin said. “Instead they will be able to use the technology to refine their search to a much smaller footprint and in some cases to the exact location.” Acting Code 100TO.4 division head Erin Small said that once fully operational the system would let teams “stay focused on safely and efficiently supporting the fleet”.
SIOP industrial operations program control specialist Jennifer Wills said the real measure would be adoption, and invited shipyard staff to use the system and feed back on it. Norfolk is only the first of four: Pearl Harbor, Puget Sound and Portsmouth follow on the same contract and the same 2027 horizon.
