Towards an Enterprise All-Domain M&S Environment for T&E: Overcoming M&S Challenges within the DOD

Abstract

Our earlier paper Data Driven Modeling and Simulation to Test the Internet of War Things described how (Werner, 2023): The Director, Operational Test and Evaluation’s Strategic Initiatives, Policy, and Emerging Technologies division (DOT&E SIPET) is shaping the test and evaluation (T&E) of future multi-domain warfighting. and how: Comprehensive Live testing of multi-domain capabilities currently under development is not possible due to environmental, fiscal, safety, classification, and ethical constraints, and so our evaluations will become more dependent on modeling and simulation (M&S) to test the efficacy and interoperability of our systems. That paper was written for a general audience but still explored the following technical challenges: • Architecting M&S and live tests to engender a “predict, live test, refine” feedback loop to improve M&S accuracy over systems' lifecycles • Ensuring integration across all warfighting domains and digital capabilities • Fielding M&S as a service so that the skillset required to operate it and understand its outputs mirrors the skills required of warfighters in the real world • Implementing an environment with real-time analysis and accurate results for T&E and operational decisions The present paper complements the earlier one by targeting a DOD technical audience and addressing several more challenges we see within the DOD: • Using M&S to credibly extrapolate outside of the operational envelope covered in live test • Rigorous lifecycle approaches to V&V that are centered around quantitative estimates of uncertainty • Accelerating M&S processing times • The risk that we do all of this rigorous work and our models still turn out to be wrong • Providing policy, guidance, best practices, executable examples, and training an M&S V&V/Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) workforce within the DOD. that we must overcome to outpace our adversaries’ capabilities.