Within modern combat, winning requires delivering integrated, flawless systems to the hands of the warfighter faster than ever before. As such, the Armaments Center, which serves a critical role in producing 90 percent of the Army’s lethality, is actively adopting digital engineering tools, building an interconnected and integrated ecosystem to bring together once-isolated tools so it can preserve its position at the head of the pack.
To continue to advance their world-class capabilities, the Armaments Center is integrating dozens of engineering tools into a single digital engineering environment, which will improve information sharing and decision making, strengthen collaboration, and reduce errors caused by manually handing off data. This will provide engineering and development teams with visibility beyond their area of expertise and will put them into an environment with unprecedented access to data and integrated analyses. Such a shift comes as engineers are increasingly encouraged to view data as an enterprise asset and to use modeling and simulation to accelerate delivery. View original
PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. - For more than a century, the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Armaments Center’s engineering legacy has been proven by the lethality of the Army’s armaments, be they on paper or in modern digital tools.
Within modern combat, winning requires delivering integrated, flawless systems to the hands of the warfighter faster than ever before. As such, the Armaments Center, which serves a critical role in producing 90 percent of the Army’s lethality, is actively adopting digital engineering tools, building an interconnected and integrated ecosystem to bring together once-isolated tools so it can preserve its position at the head of the pack.
To continue to advance their world-class capabilities, the Armaments Center is integrating dozens of engineering tools into a single digital engineering environment, which will improve information sharing and decision making, strengthen collaboration, and reduce errors caused by manually handing off data. This will provide engineering and development teams with visibility beyond their area of expertise and will put them into an environment with unprecedented access to data and integrated analyses. Such a shift comes as engineers are increasingly encouraged to view data as an enterprise asset and to use modeling and simulation to accelerate delivery.
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PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. - For more than a century, the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Armaments Center’s engineering legacy has been proven by the lethality of the Army’s armaments, be they on paper or in modern digital tools.
Within modern combat, winning requires delivering integrated, flawless systems to the hands of the warfighter faster than ever before. As such, the Armaments Center, which serves a critical role in producing 90 percent of the Army’s lethality, is actively adopting digital engineering tools, building an interconnected and integrated ecosystem to bring together once-isolated tools so it can preserve its position at the head of the pack.
To continue to advance their world-class capabilities, the Armaments Center is integrating dozens of engineering tools into a single digital engineering environment, which will improve information sharing and decision making, strengthen collaboration, and reduce errors caused by manually handing off data. This will provide engineering and development teams with visibility beyond their area of expertise and will put them into an environment with unprecedented access to data and integrated analyses. Such a shift comes as engineers are increasingly encouraged to view data as an enterprise asset and to use modeling and simulation to accelerate delivery.
The development of this digital engineering environment has been an ongoing effort with support from the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), a Department of War (DoW) University Affiliated Research Center, which is working together with the Armaments Center engineers and analysts to establish a robust, sophisticated digital engineering ecosystem on the Army’s network.
Led by Stevens Institute of Technology and funded across the DoW, SERC connects the DoW and Services with experts, including experts in digital engineering, on more than 20 college campuses across the country.
The Armaments Center already has a strong foundation of leveraging and utilizing digital engineering tools, according to Systems Engineering Deputy Director Allan Lagasca. Many of the center’s top-of-the-line experts have developed and utilized custom digital models and simulations to perform engineering analysis of ongoing projects across the acquisition life cycle. These digital engineering tools provide engineers the promise of fulfilling customer needs faster, with higher fidelity and decreased risk of errors.
However, since these digital tools are purpose built, the models are usually not well integrated, especially across different engineering disciplines. Therefore, achieving integration across the Armaments Center’s digital tool suite will be the next step in its digital engineering journey, which it’ll accomplish by implementing a hub-and-spoke architecture for its digital ecosystem.
This environment will integrate the Armaments Center’s software tools and link armaments data including requirements, architectures, computer aided designs, engineering analysis and physics simulations data. After a software tool is connected to the digital engineering ecosystem, it will be able to share data with other tools linked to the center through a hub-and-spoke approach. The project involves migrating more than 90 engineering tools into a single framework of digital twins, modernizing the Armaments Center's capabilities by 2027.
The hub-and-spoke approach involves utilizing a central hub, SBE Vision, connected to the Armaments Center’s many software tools, or spokes. SBE’s solution will serve as the core to a digital engineering environment. When changes occur in any tool or spoke, the change will be managed by the hub - SBE Vision - and communicated to the software tools, or spokes.
According to Lagasca, this system will let the team know when someone changes project data and identify the impacts of that change by tracing through a digital thread. With a digital thread, engineers will be able to see how changes in one part of the system could potentially impact other areas of the system including requirements, architectures, designs, digital models, test activities and simulations. Engineers can quickly assess the ramifications of the change by conducting an impact analysis.
As such, if a systems engineer changed a range requirement in DOORS, the Armaments Center’s requirement management tool, SBE Vision would become aware of the change and notify the appropriate tools in the ecosystem. For example, those working with AC’s architecture tool, MagicDraw, would receive notification and allow them to auto-update their software models to reflect the new range requirement. Meanwhile, engineers conducting data analysis in MATLAB would be able to immediately update their models with the new range requirement and quickly run new simulations.
Integration also automates data sharing with stakeholders, eliminating manual entry errors. Instead of engineers having to hand-key data and model updates, stakeholders will receive real-time, accurate updates through data transmission across their digital tools.
Lastly, full integration enriches the assets within the digital world to create more robust digital twins. By chaining multiple models together, this hub-and-spoke architecture enhances simulation accuracy and fidelity. Quantifying the relationships between these models will also support better decision making.
Going forward, after the SBE Vision solution is deployed, the Armaments Center plans to implement an in-house interoperability layer called the Armaments Integration and Interoperability Framework. This framework will integrate with SBE Vision and allow digital engineering systems to better capture corporate knowledge and support smarter analytics.
The physics and chemistry associated with Armaments Systems remains largely the same. But as drawing tables, pocket protectors and slide rules were replaced by computers, new more powerful tools were introduced incrementally, and not necessarily in an integrated way.
The Armaments Center, Lagasca said, holds an important place in the digital engineering sphere as a leader and early adopter, and will continue to take advantage of technological advancements. These will reduce rework, speed response to change, and give teams clearer visibility into how decisions impact designs and tests across the digital engineering spectrum.
The overall goal is to accelerate the delivery of lethality. By continuously improving its digital engineering maturity, the Armaments Center will do just that.
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