Advancing USSF Basing and Power Projection with Digital Twins

The transfer of older Air Force facilities to the USSF brings several resilient basing and suitability challenges, mainly due to new mission requirements, technological advancements, and infrastructure needs. One approach that SSC is using to manage these challenges is a concept called “exploit what we have.” “‘Exploit what we have’ leverages current space architecture in new and creative ways to push more, or even new, capability from existing assets to support the warfighter and the nation in case those systems are needed in a ‘fight tonight’ scenario,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in April 2023. Many Air Force facilities were designed and built decades ago and do not meet the specific needs of space operations. USSF missions require a greater focus on satellite command, control, and communications (C3) systems, ground station operations and maintenance, and cyber resilience. Without new approaches to facilities management, decision-makers will not be equipped with the necessary data to maintain and upgrade (if necessary) existing infrastructure to meet current and future needs brought on by a rapidly evolving mission. Integration of existing data sources using digital twin technology will dramatically enhance the efficiency and agility of base planning, operations, and sustainment – ultimately to increase power projection of our critical bases for national security. Sedaro is a cloud-scalable enterprise digital twin platform. Built to be a game engine for the real world, this platform delivers the foundational IT infrastructure, modeling frameworks, asset libraries, user interfaces, and software interfaces to virtualize real world assets for practically any organization or application. Its unique architecture allows for incredibly complex system-of-systems models to be tightly integrated with data from operational assets or 3rd party modeling tools and data services. For intelligent monitoring and authoritative decision support capabilities, the Sedaro platform supports massive multi-domain simulation in the cloud. Open-source, modern software interfaces streamline the realization of an authoritative and comprehensive common operating picture (COP). An OpenAPI, Python client, and open-source modeling ontologies enable streamlined development of situational awareness, model-tuning, and decision support tools. Through development of open-source models, open-source integration/interface software, and custom analytics and modeling interfaces, Sedaro, in collaboration with Mississippi State University (MSU) and FACTOR, Inc., will deliver a spaceport enterprise digital twin platform to cut across the full-stack of spaceport modernization priorities. This platform will provide an authoritative source of truth for facility space planning, what?if analyses for loading and resiliency, real?time monitoring of critical nodes, development of smart maintenance best practices, energy analysis/efficiency, and exercise/wargame support.