ETTC'2003 - SEE

oth the system and the manufacturing process to create it), risk analysis, support in the field,
life-cycle costing, and disposal.
The desire to reduce costs, personnel, and time while maintaining or increasing
effectiveness will make it necessary to reuse key tools and data across phases of a program
and across program lines. It will therefore be necessary to create and sustain an acquisition
infrastructure, including an M&S infrastructure. Acquisition personnel could use M&S to
predict the cost-effectiveness of potential solutions, thereby reducing the need to produce and
test expensive hardware prototypes.
It is now widely accepted that model and simulation (M&S) can potentially reduce
development times and risks associated to the acquisition of weapons systems, while
simultaneously increasing the quality of the systems and reducing the global owner cost.
However the expected gains can only be reached if M&S is used through adapted processes,
such as provided by concurrent engineering.
Concurrent engineering integrates the various activities ranging from the design of the
product to the production and the in-service maintenance, relying on multidisciplinary teams
in order to optimize simultaneously the product, its fabrication and its support, with objectives
of cost and performance.
M&S is the keystone of such a process. It is also the key working tool of a
multidisciplinary integrated team when dealing with the integration of complex systems. The
different actors (who intervene during definition, evaluation, fabrication, support…) need to
identify the necessary information in terms of tests and simulations. Once this step done, they
need to share the information and results issued from these tests and simulations. This whole
approach is embodied by the iterative building of virtual prototypes immersed in synthetic
environments, which on one hand formalize a shared vision of the system under development
and on the other hand yield the necessary needs to better understand the complex interactions
between the configuration elements of the system.
By putting together the design, realization and test engineers, the elaborated
prototypes will be realized and evaluated much easier, henceforth a better control of the
global acquisition cost.
An acquisition strategy funded on simulation consists in the joint use of simulation
techniques and tools, and the methods available for the functional decomposition of the
system, the organization of the program phases, and the necessary coherence between analog
programs. Such a strategy implies a much better management of M&S resources during
acquisition: from a mere punctual aid to the program engineering, one goes to a coherent and
integrated process.
The discussion up to now might seem rather theoretical. However it mirrors a deep
evolution of the working methods which spread widely within the industrial world:
• the 80’s have been marked by system engineering, where tree-like organizations
(decomposition following the functional architecture, with launch of the different
individual tasks) and sequential ways of working (synchronization of the
individual tasks through the successive revues of the program). The essential
support is paper, associated to a heavy and static documentation management. One
sees here the methodological inheritance of the programs launched by NASA
during the previous decades;
• in the 90’s, concurrent engineering has developed, with an increasing integration
of the “business” skills used throughout the phases of the system’s life-cycle. The
impulse of such a change has been the technological change, mainly concerning
the electronic components, which implied the simultaneous presence of varied