WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency made two multi-million dollar contract awards to create an advanced modeling and simulation environment to increase the speed at which military leaders make decisions.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development arm, awarded a $10.1 million contract to Huntsville, Ala.-based company Radiance Technologies and a $9.1 million contract to Orlando, Fla.-based Cole Engineering Services as part of its Secure Advanced Framework for Simulation and Modeling (SAFE-SiM) program.

SAFE-SiM, run out of DARPA’s Adaptive Capabilities Office, is working to develop a “government-owned and controlled, faster-than-real time,” all-domain modeling and simulation environment at the mission level.

“This capability would enable rapid analysis supporting senior-level decisions for concept of operations development, force structure composition, resource allocation and targeted technology insertion,” the contract announcement said.

Today’s modeling and simulation tools aren’t robust enough for the Pentagon’s needs, according to the SAFE-SiM program broad agency announcement from earlier this year. They can only model a limited amount of domains or areas, aren’t well-attuned to cyber and electronic warfare, and struggle to account for the “factorial increase” in inter-relationships in a multi-domain kill-web, the announcement said. It also said current modeling and simulation architectures can’t process and disseminate data across classification levels quickly enough.

Work is anticipated to be completed on both contracts in August 2021. Fiscal 2020 research, development, test and evaluation funds totaling $3.75 million were obligated at the time of the award.

As for Cole Engineering, fiscal 2021 RDT&E funds amounting to $3.31 million were obligated at the time of the award.

The contract was competitively awarded with 10 solicitations received.

About Andrew Eversden

Andrew Eversden covers all things defense technology for C4ISRNET. He previously reported on federal IT and cybersecurity for Federal Times and Fifth Domain, and worked as a congressional reporting fellow for the Texas Tribune. He was also a Washington intern for the Durango Herald. Andrew is a graduate of American University.

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