validated with physical tests and can now be used to replace crash tests at sharply reduced costs. Later, the crash test work from the commercial industry was transferred to the military when improvised ex - plosive devices became a major threat in the Middle East conflicts. GVSC hired automotive industry crash experts to work on underbody blast. However, blast events involve greater accelerations in a shorter time than crashes, requiring development of new algorithms. Physical testing was prohibitively expensive, eventually leading to an end-to-end system-level M&S tool that produced life-saving modifications to military vehicles at greatly reduced costs. Two other successful digital efforts have been ASTC (Autonomous Sys - tems Testing Capability) and Project GL (Great Lakes). The Army Futures Command and the Army Test and Evaluation Command developed a virtual environment, the ASTC, to test the safety and performance of ground vehicle autonomous software prior to live testing on a range. They reduced a 1,000-mile autonomous vehicle test from 10 weeks to 2.5 hours at 2 per - cent of the cost to inform live testing. Project GL is a simulation soft - ware framework built on top of Un - real Engine, which is a powerful, real-time 3D creation tool. Project GL
is designed with an architecture to achieve modularity, supportability, cost effectiveness, and scalability. It includes a government-managed li - brary comprised of 16 software plug- ins. Examples of plugins are driv - able models of vehicles, geo-specific terrain, Light Detection and Rang - ing, and radar sensor implementa - tion. Simulation software is built from these added project plugins, hence reducing development time and cost due to the modular code base. Use cases include crew station development, virtual experimenta - tion, autonomous simulation, and immersive visualizations. The work won the U.S. Army 2024 M&S Award. M&S reduces the need for testing, as in the case of underbody blasts; digital twins reduce the need for physical prototypes; more digital threads are available to interconnect data, resulting in fewer siloed data repositories; and schedules will be shortened and costs reduced in new acquisition programs, while prob - lematic programs will be identified earlier. Through these and similar efforts within the U.S. Army, a new digital en - gineering enterprise has been set into motion across the product life cycle.
Army’s senior research scientist for Ground Vehicles. Currently, he is on special assign- ment with the U.S. Army Office of the Assis- tant Deputy for Acquisition and Systems Management for Data, Engineering and Soft- ware, where he developed the Digital Engi- neering Strategy for the Army. Gorsich holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Applied Mathematics. DASCH is a principal scientist with Huntington Ingalls Industries and works at the DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center in the Chief Scientist Office. Formerly, she was a Techni- cal Fellow at General Motors Research and Development Center where she conducted research on environmental issues caused by vehicles and manufacturing plants. Dasch holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in Nuclear and Atmospheric Chemistry.
The authors can be contacted at David.j.gorsich.civ@army.mil and jean.dasch@gmail.com .
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and not the Department of War. Reproduction or reposting of articles from Defense Acquisition magazine should credit the authors and the magazine.
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GORSICH is the chief scientist at the DEV- COM Ground Vehicle Systems Center and the
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