New approach to military manufacturing

for an entire vehicle. The agency is inviting individuals, small teams and businesses and major defense contractors to compete.

The release notes that the first challenge already has attracted more than 850 competitors organized in more than 200 teams.

In the past, fighter aircraft, tanks, and other complex military systems have been built in a craftsmen-like process by a small number of highly specialized contractors. A new design is broken down into subsystems designed by different teams. These preliminary designs are integrated, prototyped, and tested. The integrated systems rarely meet the requirements so the process is repeated until they do.

This is a costly approach and DARPA is attempting to replace it with the more efficient “correct by construction” process similar to that practiced by the semiconductor industry, which has an impressive track record in getting systems right in the first place.

“This is the kind of innovation that allows separation of design from fabrication. Right now, the design can only be done by a shop that has the integrated capability to do a complete production run. The idea is to detangle design from production and make the entire process more open, innovative and competitive,” said Sandeep Neema, research associate professor and ISIS senior research scientist and principal investigator for the META-X project.

ISIS computer scientists and engineers also view this effort in a wider context. They are convinced that it represents the next generation of engineering design where computer modeling, simulation, model verification and automated synthesis become the dominant paradigm.

“We’re right on the cusp of really big changes and DARPA’s investment in open source tooling for AVM can really help democratize these changes for both current and future generations of engineers,” said Larry Howard, ISIS senior research scientist and principal investigator for VehicleFORGE.

Since the time of Henry Ford, manufacturing has been dominated by the economies of scale: the unit cost of making an object can be reduced by making more of them. “This new paradigm can provide many of the advantages of mass production when making one-of-a-kind systems,” commented Ted Bapty, ISIS senior research scientist and research associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

For such a paradigm shift to occur, it must be adopted by the younger generation. One part of the AVM program is an undergraduate design contest called the Model-Based Amphibious Racing Challenge (MBARC), which was held on the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base in southern California on 19 January.

The release notes that the first competition has participants from three universities — Vanderbilt, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley. Using the AVM software, the students were challenged to come up with truly novel designs that can be fabricated quickly.

The Vanderbilt entry was created in a class where undergraduate students learn about the computer modeling and simulation tools being created at ISIS.

“With Vanderbilt-ISIS a key player in the whole AVM project, we are uniquely positioned to demonstrate these tools to other institutions and ultimately increase their adoption in practice,” said Tom Withrow, assistant professor of the practice of mechanical engineering.