DARPA is looking to solve the problem of runaway defense systems projects by reinventing how complex systems are developed and manufactured. They aim to do this by borrowing from the playbooks of integrated circuit developers and open-source software projects. And in the process, the agency's Adaptive Vehicle Make project may reinvent manufacturing itself, and seed the workforce with a new generation of engineers who can "compile" innovations into new inventions without having to be tied to a manufacturing plant.

"The direction we've been going in defense acquisition can't last," DARPA AVM deputy program manager and Army Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman said in a press briefing attended by Ars Technica. "The systems we build are more complex, but the way we do it hasn't changed much in 50 years." He pointed out that the Army alone had spent $22 billion over the last 10 years on programs that got cancelled. He said that DOD wasn't far off from a tongue-in-cheek statement made by former Lockheed Martin president Norman Augustine—one of "Augustine's Laws"—that by 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase one aircraft.

Factory of the future

The AVM project aims to change that by reducing the "product cycle" of defense systems from an average of almost 10 years down to two years—similar to the design cycle for new integrated circuits. To do that, DARPA is funding the development of software tools, called META, that will allow engineers to design, prototype and test systems collaboratively before they are ever built.

And today, DARPA released the final solicitation for IFAB (Instant Foundry Adaptive through Bits), a computer-driven flexible manufacturing capability that will allow for distributed, software-driven manufacturing of systems in "foundries" that can be quickly reconfigured to new tasks, using technologies like computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) machine tools and "additive manufacturing" (otherwise known as 3D printing) to scale up rapidly from prototype to full production runs. The goal of the IFAB program, Wiedenman said, is "to build the factory of the future, using software that can rapidly reconfigure a factory for new products with no need to retool to build something new."

The auto industry has been pushing forward the idea of digital design and prototyping for over a decade, linking in suppliers with master computer-aided design files and doing supercomputer-powered crash tests. But that has all been within the confines of closed product lifecycle management systems. DARPA's AVM projects seek to create a model-based design approach that would allow engineers to collaborate on designs of new vehicles like developers working on a software project, using a set of tools that allow them to do "correct by construction design," Wiedenman said.

Correct by construction is an engineering approach used in software engineering and integrated circuit design that uses mathematical models to check the impact each component of a system has on the whole, ensuring that the design falls within certain constraints. DARPA is funding the development of engineering "meta-tools" that would allow engineers to contribute components to a design that would be checked against a set of models, checking for potential unintended integration issues.

The designs coming out of the META tools will then get transmitted to IFAB foundries, where software will generate processes for machines and human workers to follow. The IFAB can communicate back suggested changes to the designers providing information about manufacturing limitations and ways to modify the design to reduce cost. Because the process can be decoupled from any one manufacturing plant, Wiedenman said, the IFAB "doesn't have to exist under one roof"—it can be an "amalgamation of capabilities, connected by software."

The first test of IFAB will be to produce a prototype for the Marine Corps' Amphibious Combat Vehicle, a reboot of the Corps' failed Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program. DARPA chose the ACV program because "It was important for us to do a real product," Wiedenman explained, "and show we could build a system of appropriate complexity—not a toaster." DARPA Tactical Technology Office program manager Paul Eremenko added that since the IFAB effort will compete against conventionally-designed prototypes vying for the contract, it provides a real world problem to solve"control case" to measure results against.

Community-source vehicles

In parallel with the ACV effort Eremenko said DARPA is also launching an "open-source" vehicle program called VehicleForge.mil, which will test what he called a "democratization of the innovation process " made possible by the META tools. "The goal is to democratize innovation by several orders of magnitude beyond what we're doing with the ACV," Eremenko said, in a similar way to how open source has driven innovation in software.

"In the open source software world, anybody can go in and modify the design, and check it in, and the community can recompile it and see what the impact is," Eremenko explained. "That process has proven itself and has yielded very high quality software." The barrier to doing open source with physical complex systems, he said, is that while it's easy enough to set up a shared "drawing tree," there's been no way to get an understanding of the impact of design changes as there is when software gets compiled. "Our META tools function as a compiler," he said—providing a way to assess those changes as they are checked in against models.

The META tools are still in development, so it may be a year or so before VehicleForge.mil gets off the ground. But when it does, DARPA plans to launch a series of design challenges to use the open-source approach to design the Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG). Universities and other challenge participants will be able to collaborate using the META tools and the Vehicleforge.mil community.

DARPA also plans to include high schools in less complex challenges. Through AVM's Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) program, "we're focused on how to get the right level of tools out to the high school level" trying to kickstart interest in the technology, Eremenko said. The agency will deploy as many as a thousand 3D printers to high schools, and allow students from different schools to collaborate using social networking tools to build robots, go-carts, and other projects to compete in prize challenges.