Digital Engineering to Digitize and Automate the DoD Integrated Decision Support Key (IDSK) to Expedite Air Force Acquisitions

On July 5, 2018, the DoD announced its Digital Engineering strategy to accelerate decision-making and delivery of weapon systems. Further, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall released the Operational Imperatives for the Air Force with effective and resilient space order of battle and architectures being number one. In line with AF strategic priorities, there is an immediate need to utilize commercially-proven digital engineering tools that can accelerate the delivery of space capabilities – ultimately to maintain the US’ lead in the great power competition.  Celeris Systems seeks to help the Air Force with this challenge through its TRL-9 test management platform, called iRIS, which integrates critical system test functions and data into an easy-to-use, high-performance digital engineering environment. Specifically, Celeris will create a robust digital thread between the DoD’s two most critical acquisition management tools that form the foundation for AF systems acquisition, the Developmental Evaluation Framework (DEF) and Operational Evaluation Framework (OEF). The absence of automation between these frameworks often results in outdated information for program decision-making and causes significant delays (often over 12 months) for $100M+ acquisitions, impacting the agile delivery of new weapon systems for the warfighter. Celeris will help transition the DoD from the laborious and error-prone approach to creating system evaluation frameworks, into the agile and scalable evaluation platform needed to provide timely, consistent and repeatable work products that leverages on-going T&V activities Wargames, experimentation, M&S, test events, analyses and other data sources provide data for evaluation. Automation harvests data that T&V is already generating or should be generating. Knowledge used to make Developmental and Operational decisions will be generated using a consistent and repeatable approach thereby reducing transition risk.