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Workshop Statement of Task

Today’s U.S. military is facing an increasingly diverse range of national security threats that often evolve more rapidly than the defense industry can adapt. In addition, the accelerating pace of technology advancement coupled with globalization trends is eroding U.S technological superiority, as the cost for developing increasingly exquisite and complex military platforms is unsustainable. Maintaining a military advantage in the future will require a new approach to the design of military systems and systems of systems that can rapidly adapt to new threats while imposing significant cost to U.S. adversaries to counter. Reversing the time and cost curves associated with the development of military systems will require rethinking design in a way that enables new insights regarding the balance among cost, performance, schedule, and adaptability metrics. This workshop will explore evolving paradigms for design and manufacturing that offer high leverage on these metrics, including the following:

• Novel, scalable mathematical and modeling frameworks for reliably predicting performance and life cycle costs of complex physical systems in high-dimensional systems engineering tradespaces that explicitly consider manufacturing and materials alternatives.
• Computationally efficient forward and inverse models that can accurately predict system-level performance under uncertainty in model input parameters as well as in the physical models themselves. Models that can accurately predict the system-level impacts of change propagation.

• Novel tools and methodologies to rapidly develop and qualify advanced materials for military platforms.
• Design for manufacturing approaches that exploit the flexibility of additive manufacturing, robotics, and other techniques, combined with defense access to adaptable commercial production capabilities to meet unique defense requirements.