Army Awards Phase II SBIR to Help Curb the Prohibitive Costs of Upgrading Legacy DoD Systems

This post originally appeared on the Adventium Labs website. Adventium was acquired by Galois in 2022.

When upgrading or redesigning a complex system, like an aircraft, it is crucial to understand the ripple effect of design changes on the system’s resulting costs, especially costs related to re-certification. Small, local changes to any subsystem or component can have broad impacts on system requirements, including size, weight, and power budgets; bandwidth and processor utilization; timing constraints; safety requirements; and security controls.

The Tooling to Understand Ripple Effect Costs (TUREC) project addresses this complicated problem by providing system engineers actionable information to evaluate the system-wide consequences to changes they make anywhere within that system. TUREC lowers the risks to schedule and budget that developers face anytime they are tasked with enhancing capabilities of a complex system.

TUREC will make Adventium Labs’ existing Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tools change-aware by implementing a change impact cost estimation from each tool’s point-of-view. The developer will be able to prioritize critical aspects of the design, like safety requirements and security controls, by defining how various changes are weighted using a customizable Change Impact Function (CIF). The change impact cost measurements will then be displayed by Adventium’s Trade Space Explorer, which enumerates and visualizes the impact that changes have on overall costs.

The $1.1 million award made through the Army’s SBIR program allows Adventium to integrate TUREC’s change impact capabilities across the multiple analysis tools found in its CAMET® Library. CAMET subscribers will also have access to the software and processes required to convert third-party tools to be change-aware.

To learn more about the CAMET Library of MBSE tools, click here.