SBIR-STTR Award

This proposal provides a solution to problems in using disparate integrated computer-based design tools to determine the performance of underwater weapon and vehicle concepts. The proposed system would consist of a suite of domain-specific engineering software applications that undersea weapon and vehicle engineers would access and operate via personal computers as thin-clients over a secure network. Critical to enabling this design environment is a middle layer of software that provides workflow management, messaging services, analysis integration, optimization, and data and model persistence. A presentation layer of software applications will be able to provide an immersive user interface to interact with engineering applications. Such a system can be easily extended as new analysis applications become available and as the user community grows.

Benefits:
The benefit of such a system has two components, reduction of total ownership cost, and improved quality of design. The reduction of cost comes from the fact that potential design conflicts have been resolved early in design, in such a way that optimizes not only the weapon or vehicle design, but also its manufacturability, and life cycle maintenance costs. The system achieves this benefit by encouraging product team members to utilize the best available design, manufacturing, and operation tools, as well as to communicate and negotiate frequently. The system benefits not only the design team, but also the application developers, by allowing easier updates of codes during the design cycle, and by providing an environment to test, validate, and benchmark new codes. To the undersea weapon and vehicle design community, the system provides a framework for the product development, access to all the necessary applications, and produces greater capability than the individual applications alone.

Keywords:
simulation-based design, integrated design environment, design workflow management, underwater vehicle design, underwater weapon design

As a result of our Phase I research, BPG has determined that development of an integrated simulation-based design environment is both technologically and economically feasible. Critical to this effort was identifying a business model and define a scenario based on that model around which to demonstrate our proposed integrated simulation-based design environment for the UWV. This scenario, as well as one oriented toward the commercial AUV/UUV communities to be developed at the outset of Phase II will guide the development the ISBDE we have proposed. The overarching goal of the proposed Phase II work is to establish and demonstrate the economic benefits of an ISBDE, and not to develop a fully complete and deployable suite of tools and services. To achieve this goal, our primary technical objective is then to develop a prototype of an ISBDE around our identified scenarios. Use of this prototype will allow us to capture business process metrics; capture technology performance metrics; revise the UWV ISBDE commercialization plan and BPG's overall business plan to ensure the success of both the UWV ISBDE and BPG; and revise/extend the ISBDE implementation architecture based on metrics results