WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB, Ohio – U.S. Air Force researchers are asking DCS Corp. in Alexandria, Va., for new ways of predicting the effects of bombs, missiles, electronic warfare (EW), cyber attacks, and reconnaissance missions in military operations against potential enemies.
Officials of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, announced a $94.7 million five-year contract to DCS last week for the Assessment of Sensing-Autonomy Sensor Exploitation Technologies (ASSET) program.
ASSET, sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab's sensors directorate, seeks to develop tools to model, analyze, assess, and predict mission-level effects from sensor fusion or from modeling and simulation. The project involves technologies related to artificial intelligence (AI), machine autonomy, and machine learning.
The program has goals in four technology areas: mission effects modeling and analysis; multi-domain sensing autonomy; support for key mission areas; and battlespace decision support.
Effects modeling
Mission effects modeling and analysis (MEMA) focuses on understanding, predicting, and evaluating how military operations perform under various conditions. It’s about simulating the weapons effects of systems, tactics, or environmental factors on mission outcomes. MEMA aims to answer questions like: “If we deploy this weapon system in this environment, how effective will it be?”
Modeling and simulation involves building virtual representations of missions, systems, and environments, including aircraft, ships, sensors, communications, and enemy behavior, and running scenarios where mission variables change to see their effects.
Applications can involve evaluating new weapons or sensors before deployment; training commanders with realistic simulations of battlefield conditions; risk assessment and contingency planning; and designing resilient systems and plans.
MEMA provides decision-makers with insights on how a mission likely will perform under realistic conditions to enable informed choices on tactics, technology investments, and planning.
Autonomous sensing
Multi-domain sensing autonomy combines autonomous decision-making with the ability to sense and operate across several different military environments. It involves how military systems can perceive, interpret, and act across land, sea, air, space, and cyber environments without constant human input. It’s about autonomous systems that understand and react to their surroundings in several different environments simultaneously.
Support for key mission areas targets improvements to strike, electronic warfare (EW), and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Battlespace decision support, meanwhile, enables autonomous and semi-autonomous systems to fuse information across domains and deliver actionable intelligence to warfighters quickly and reliably.
On this contract, DCS will do the work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and should be finished by February 2031. For more information contact DCS Corp. online at www.dcscorp.com, or the Air Force Research Laboratory at www.afrl.af.mil.
