Highlights of the CREATE Program

Today, rapid product innovation is essential to remain competitive. To help spur innovation in the acquisition of major defense systems and reduce their cost, time, and risks, the US Department of Defense launched the Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) program in 2006 to develop and deploy physics-based, high-performance computing software applications for the design and analysis of military aircraft, ships, and radio frequency antenna systems (and more recently, ground vehicles) through the construction and analysis of virtual prototypes. Code development began in 2008, and eight years later, CREATE is already beginning to accomplish these goals.

The Aircraft Design, Analysis, Performance, and Tradespace (ADAPT) fixed wing aircraft conceptual design tool is in production by the High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) program. ADAPT allows US Government aircraft designers to easily integrate and use multi-disciplinary tools in a common framework, explore the aircraft design tradespace, and leverage HPC resources at the conceptual design stage. It is comprised of three major pieces. The first is the extensible ADAPT data structure, which provides the common framework for integrating multi-disciplinary tools. The second is the ADAPT GUI, which enables conceptual designers to easily set inputs, document work, and analyze results. The final piece is the ADAPT execution engine, which runs the integrated multi-disciplinary toolset on desktop or HPC machines. This paper will lay out the motivation and need for the ADAPT software program, along with current capabilities and future development plans.

This report, an update to a 2010 report, Considerations For Using Agile In DoD Acquisitions, addresses developments in commercial Agile practices as well as the Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition environment. It covers some previously unanswered questions and asks some new ones. It includes new research, examples of Agile in practice, and policy updates. Continuing with the 2010 report’s theme, this report updates the exploration of these questions: Can Agile be used in the DoD environment? If so, how? It includes lessons learned from DoD programs that have employed Agile and information gleaned from myriad articles and books on Agile. While this report does not pretend to cover every paper or thought published about Agile in the DoD world, it provides an updated overview of some challenges in using Agile, an overview of how some programs have addressed these challenges, and some additional recommendations on dealing with these challenges. The intended audience is policy makers, program office staff, and software development contractors who are contemplating proposing the use of Agile methods. We hope this report stimulates new discussion about adopting Agile in the DoD world and equips practitioners with the information they need to make informed decisions.

The increased reliance on commercial satellites for military operations has made it essential for the Department of Defense (DoD) to adopt a supply chain framework to address cybersecurity threats in space. This paper presents a satellite supply chain framework, the Cybersecurity Supply Chain (CSSC) Framework, for the DoD in the evaluation and selection of commercial satellite contracts. The proposed strategy is informed by research on cybersecurity threats to commercial satellites, national security concerns, current DoD policy, and previous cybersecurity frameworks. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive approach for safeguarding commercial satellites used by the DoD and ensuring the security of their supporting components. Inspired by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-171 requirements and the DoD’s future Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) process, the two-part framework significantly streamlines the NIST requirements to accommodate small businesses. It also extends key NIST requirements to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) suppliers. The CSSC Framework complements the CMMC certification process by addressing the need for cybersecurity requirements for all subcontractors supporting a commercial space asset. The framework incorporates a scoring process similar to CMMC scoring, granting points to a subcontractor for meeting the cybersecurity requirements outlined by the framework. In addition, the framework creates a space architecture overview that details the overall bid score and establishes a matrix based on individual requirements. This model and matrix allow DoD acquisition personnel to closely analyze each contract bid, comparing the subcontractor's strengths and weaknesses to other bidders. The CSSC Framework will allow the DoD to apply NIST standards to subcontractors who do not meet the requirements for CMMC certification.

Digital engineering (DE) is “an integrated digital approach that uses authoritative sources of systems’ data and models as a continuum across disciplines to support lifecycle activities from concept through disposal. A DE ecosystem is an interconnected infrastructure, environment, and methodology that enables the exchange of digital artifacts from an authoritative source of truth.” (DAU, 2017) Digital transformation is fundamentally changing the way acquisition and engineering are performed across a wide range of government agencies, industries, and academia and is characterized by the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, changing fundamental operations and how results are delivered in terms of new value to customers. It includes cultural change centered on alignment across leadership, strategy, customers, operations, and workforce evolution. In 2020, the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) developed a Digital Engineering Competency Framework (DECF) to support the US Department of Defense (DoD). This paper provides an update to the DECF (version. 1.1) and a mapping of some existing DoD training resources against the DECF. It discusses gaps and provides a few high‐level recommendations on how to build DE competency in the DoD acquisition workforce. Though the DECF and the training included here are specific to the DoD, the competency framework is intended to be relevant to anyone working in the DE space.

The QinetiQ Aerospace Consultancy group has been actively developing and applying process automation and optimisation capabilities in support of air vehicle assessment and design for over 20 years. These capabilities have evolved greatly during this timeframe from their initial origins as research activities, into mature capabilities for underpinning decision making in both civil and military air vehicle projects. In parallel the same generic approaches have also found usage in weapons, maritime and motorsport design. In recent years effort has focussed on enhancing a number of different, but complementary, capabilities at QinetiQ, each of which have different advantages and disadvantages, but which together better address the needs of air vehicle assessment and design. These capabilities are linked by a common requirement to assess widely differing characteristics concurrently, in order to model the consequences of design decisions, such as technology and system choices, in terms of the overall impact on an air vehicle project. This paper describes these tools in the context of their use within the Integrated Wing project.

: This report describes the preliminary analysis and findings of our study exploring what drives successful organizational adaptation in the context of technology transition and acquisition within the Department of Defense (DoD). It is based on our initial collection and analysis of archival and interview data. We began this study seeking to understand what influences the successful transition of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies to the warfighter, focusing on the Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration (JCTD) office as a successful case study. In the course of our investigation, we noted shifts in organization structure, goals, and business processes of the JCTD in response to changing needs of warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Further exploration indicated that these shift were not unique to the JCTD, but were one example of many adaptive solutions to changing needs faced by the DoD acquisition community. This led us to focus our research on better understanding what drives successful organizational adaptation. Our preliminary analysis suggests that ad hoc problem solving may be an undervalued yet broadly practiced skill set within the DoD, which may support adaptive responses to change by the acquisition community. We are currently collecting additional data, which we will use to further explicate our findings.

In conjunction with NASA and the Department of Defense, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) has been investigating analytical techniques to address many of the fundamental issues associated with solar exploration spacecraft and high-speed atmospheric vehicle systems. These issues include: thermo-structural response including the effects of thermal management via the use of surface optical properties for high-temperature composite structures; aerodynamics with the effects of non-equilibrium chemistry and gas radiation; and aero-thermodynamics with the effects of material ablation for a wide range of thermal protection system (TPS) materials. The need exists to integrate these discrete tools into a common framework that enables the investigation of interdisciplinary interactions (including analysis tool, applied load, and environment uncertainties) to provide high fidelity solutions. In addition to developing robust tools for the coupling of aerodynamically induced thermal and mechanical loads, JHU/APL has been studying the optimal design of high-speed vehicles as a function of their trajectory. Under traditional design methodology the optimization of system level mission parameters such as range and time of flight is performed independently of the optimization for thermal and mechanical constraints such as stress and temperature. A truly optimal trajectory should optimize over the entire range of mission and thermo-mechanical constraints. Under this research, a framework for the robust analysis of high-speed spacecraft and atmospheric vehicle systems has been developed. It has been built around a generic, loosely coupled framework such that a variety of readily available analysis tools can be used. The methodology immediately addresses many of the current analysis inadequacies and allows for future extension in order to handle more complex problems.

Cart3D is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application aimed at conceptual and preliminary design of aerospace vehicles with complex geometries. It is widely used by design engineers at NASA, Department of Defense and aerospace companies in the USA. We present detailed performance analysis of Cart3D using two tools SGI MPInside and op_scope that collects hardware counter data from Intel Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) on supercomputers based on Nehalem micro-architecture. Using these tools, we have done dynamic profiling of Cart3D (compute time, communication time and I/O time), along with dynamic profiling of MPI functions (MPI_Sendrecv, MPI_Bcast, MPI_Isend, MPI_Irecv, MPI_Allreduce, MPI_Barrier, etc.) with respect to message size of each rank and time consumed by each function. MPI communication is further analyzed by studying the performance of MPI functions used in this application as a function of message size and number of cores. Using these tools we have also studied efficiency of the processor to measure its effective utilization, efficiency of the floating-point units, percentage of vectorization and percentage of data coming from L2 cache, L3 cache, and main memory. This study was performed on two computing sub-systems based on quad-core Nehalem-EP and hex-core West mere-EP processors that are part of Pleiades an SGI Altix ICE at NASA Ames Research Center.

ABSTRACTOver the last ten years, there have been enormous changes in the fundamental factors that influence the development and procurement of submarine sonar systems. These changes can be summarized as: 1) the end of the Cold War; 2) a commercial sector technology revolution; and 3) Department of Defense (DoD) realizations that acquisition reforms were mandatory. Against this backdrop is the fact that the acoustic advantage held by U.S. submarines was being eroded by Russian nuclear submarine development and the proliferation of quiet non‐nuclear submarines among countries of concern to the United States. A dramatic, innovative approach to reclaiming acoustic superiority had to be devised. The solution is the Acoustic‐Rapid COTS (Commercial‐Off‐the‐Shelf) Insertion (A‐RCI) program. A‐RCI brings the benefits of the commercial processing revolution and DoD acquisition reforms to the submarine sonar system. It will provide a sonar system upgrade with far more capability than the existing systems have today at a fraction of their cost. This article provides a framework from which to view the significant leap that A‐RCI provides to the Navy, and details both the programmatic and technical sides of the program to help the reader understand the impact A‐RCI will have on the operating forces.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Civilian Acquisition Workforce Personnel Demonstration Project (AcqDemo) is an effort to reengineer the civilian personnel system to meet the needs of the acquisition workforce and to facilitate the fulfillment of the DoD acquisition mission. Congress required independent assessment of the program against 12 criteria by September 30, 2012. This report is that legislatively mandated assessment.

Flapping-wing micro air vehicles controlled by tail are poor in stability and maneuverability. A crank-slider and double-pendulum control mechanism which integrates flap and control and provides a good maneuverability by breaking the symmetry between the flapping motions of two lateral wings is proposed for the design of flapping-wing micro air vehicles. The kinematics of this mechanism is analyzed and the effects of flapping angles, flapping amplitudes, and the differences between the flapping angles of two lateral wings on the maneuverability are discussed. The results indicate that flapping angle differences between two lateral wings generated by breaking the symmetry play the most important role in providing good maneuverability. The maneuverability of turning is obtained by moving the pivots of the flapping bars in the system and a servo-gear-rack device is used to realize the movement. The proposed novel flap–control mechanism is compact and easy to control.

The aerodynamic design of micro air vehicles is challenging since previous studies have shown that the aerodynamic efficiency of airfoils and wings decreases substantially at low Reynolds-numbers. While many MAV approaches investigate biological designs, here a study is conducted on the aerodynamics of paper airplanes, which fly in the same Reynolds-number range as MAV, but have the advantage of simplicity compared to biological counterparts. Flow visualizations and force measurements in a water tunnel as well as large-eddy simulations are presented on one of the simplest paper airplane design: the dart. The results show that the high-sweep delta design of such an airplane provides high lift coefficients at low Reynolds-numbers. Furthermore, the centerfold of the airplane as a mean to improve the aerodynamic performance is identified.

Air-structure interaction is a key aspect to account for during the design of Micro Air Vehicles. In this context, modelisation and numerical simulations represent a powerful tool to analyse aerodynamic performances. This work proposes an advanced fluid–structure interaction numerical technique for the simulation of dragonfly wings, considered one of the most interesting model due to their complex flapping kinematic. The fluid subproblem, described by incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, is solved in a Finite Element Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian framework, while the solid subproblem is addressed using structural Finite Element, such as membranes and beams. Moreover, a novel remeshing algorithm based on connectivity manipulation and refinement procedure has been implemented to reduce element distortion in fluid mesh, thus increasing the accuracy of the fluid solution. Firstly, the deformation of a single hindwing has been studied. Secondly, the dragonfly model is enriched by incorporating the forewing and a simplified thorax geometry. Preliminary results highlight the complex dynamic of the fluid around the body as well as the efficiency of the proposed mesh generation algorithm.

Evolution of the design of micro air vehicles (MAVs) towards miniaturization has been severely constrained by the size and mass of the electronic components needed to control the vehicles. Recent research, experimentation, and development in the area of smart materials have led to the possibility of embedding control actuators, fabricated from smart materials, in the wing of the vehicle, reducing both the size and mass of these components. Further advantages can be realized by developing adaptive wing structures. Small size and mass, and low airspeeds, can lead to considerable buffeting during flight, and may result in a loss of flight control. In order to counter these effects, we are developing a thin, variable-cambered airfoil design with actuators embedded within the wing. In addition to reducing the mass and size of the vehicle or, conversely, increasing its available payload, an important benefit from the adaptive wing concept is the possibility of in-flight modification of the flight envelope. Reduced airspeeds, which are crucial during loiter, can be realized by an in-flight increase in wing camber. Conversely, decreases in camber provide for an airframe best suited for rapid ingress/egress and extension of the mission range.