The Defense Systems & Technologies Division (DST) aims to educate future industry and government leaders of the defense community while improving the design, acquisition, and operation of systems through the use of innovative methods and techniques. Defense systems are increasing in complexity as information and communications technology surges. Under increasing budgetary constraints, our stakeholders require the greatest capability in a timely and effective manner. To help the defense community meet today’s challenges, our division seeks to help decision makers choose the most operationally sound, technically feasible, and effective program investments. These techniques include enhanced interoperability of systems for multidomain operations, addressing unique design challenges of cyberphysical systems, and assessing technological advances across operational paradigms.

The DST Division is developing novel techniques to address many challenges facing the Department of Defense (DoD) today. They include field surrogate and reduced-order modeling to enable rapid analysis of high-fidelity functional data, development of a multidisciplinary generic hypersonic vehicle design environment, and enhanced system-of-systems (SoS) modeling techniques to integrate these techniques into operations analysis. The SoS modeling techniques also support the DoD’s Digital Engineering Strategy. In addition to utilizing MBSE methods developed in ASDL’s Advanced Methods Division and Digital Engineering Division, we are using reinforcement learning algorithms to improve decision making at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels, and utilizing field surrogate models for multi-fidelity, multi-domain campaign modeling in Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration and Modeling (AFSIM).

Team

• Evan Harrison, Division Chief
• Cengiz Akinli
• Adam Cox