USAF Announces New Priority for Simulation

Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper released a new report entitled “Take the Red Pill: The New Digital Acquisition Reality” making an urgent call to “eCreate before you aviate,” and the implication is that simulation has just been given a radically higher focus than ever before. The new report makes simulation, of the type we have focused on training GURU to conduct autonomously, a mandatory pillar of future technology development:

Today, there are no prototypes in Formula 1, not physical ones anyway. Every aspect of future cars - from parts and assembly; to the complicated physics of material combustion, and even tire deformation; interactions, engine to maintenance across a grueling racing season - is meticulously modeled. These models, interconnected from upfront supplier specs to backend logistics, form one digital thread. And this digital thread is used to eCreate millions of eCars in pursuit of a winning design. 

Furthermore, the report spells out a need to “own the tech stack” (there's no better way to run a multitude of simulation tech coming from multiple vendors than with GURU) and highlights the importance of applications such as digital twin (where any wait time in executing simulation is unaffordable). There is no greater distillation of why GURU is needed than this report:

The tech stack is your system's lifecycle "Matrix": a comprehensive environment capable of digitally modeling and massively iterating all its aspects without the shackles of real-world runtime, risk, or cost. Built correctly, your ideal eSystem "wakes up" from this digital reality with all designs, assembly and maintenance processes, testing, and even human learning intact. Owning the tech stack is the modern-day successor to owning the tech baseline. Whereas a tech baseline is all data needed to support a system's lifecycle, a tech stack is all data, models, software, and associated infrastructure needed to create and optimize a system's lifecycle digitally. The power of having a lifecycle digital thread is the stuff of science fiction but fraught with potential missteps. Like the movie, if you don't own your tech stack and its reference architecture, it may end up owning you. 

In order to run the amount of simulation, and in the manner identified as the new standard in this report, two requirements will have to be met: 

1. Enable general engineering teams and enlisted people to start using specialized simulation software ASAP (democratize access), 
2. Radically reduce simulation setup time from hours down to minutes (minimize manual workload).

We have been told these two requirements numerous times during our customer discovery conducted the last several months across industries, and several government agencies including MDA, NASA, NRO for democratizing trajectory prediction; AFRL, DOE, ERDC, and NGA for democratizing CFD; and the ARMY and SOCOM for democratizing virtual world simulation.

Recent quotes from Roper make the priority clear, talking about simulation dependent so-called ‘e-series’ airplanes:

“Every new program will begin as an e-system because not only are you lowering our risk, but you’re going to give us life-cycle benefits before we ever pay that physical-world tax, which is a big step to take.”

He also wants industry “to start leaning forward with us, and make their own investment” in the digital technology and called this a “watershed moment” in history.

The entire reason GURU exists is to respond to the growing need to leverage simulation in engineering, and the fact that the human workload is prohibiting most engineers from doing that. The Air Force is clearly leading the way to a new expectation for the volume of simulation that will now be considered mandatory in the development of new aircraft and many other technologies, and GURU will be ready to make it possible for engineers to answer this new paradigm!