Air Force seeks new opportunities to apply the computer-to-prototype model of design
Summary
Air Force officials are looking to expand the program under which new equipment is designed completely digitally, and moving to construction without blueprints or clay models. And so if I could just start real quick by saying digital engineering is really the creation of computer readable models and data to represent all aspects of a system including its components and other systems, it’ll integrate with operational missions, it will support – and integrating all of this into a digital model that can be used as a foundation for our engineering and acquisition activities. Tom Temin: In other words, the computer aided designs were then in effect, I’m probably simplifying, but were fed to the machines cutting the metal – or whatever it is, these things are made of – directly so that they could be built in skipping a lot of modeling. And all of this provides an opportunity for earlier and more frequent analysis, and informs formal hardware evaluations that can reduce surprise in operational test that cause rework today, late in [an] acquisition program lifecycle. Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Kristen Baldwin, she’s deputy assistant secretary for Science, Technology and Engineering at the Air Force.