The Role of Digital Engineering in Next-Gen Defence Asset Development

The defence sector is undergoing a digital transformation, with cutting-edge technologies like Digital Engineering revolutionising the design, testing, and deployment of mission-critical assets. By leveraging advanced simulation tools, India can enhance its defense capabilities, ensuring efficiency, agility, and strategic superiority.

- Prem Andrade

The government's 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' initiative encourages domestic companies to develop cutting-edge defence products and reduce import dependency. Therefore, it is essential that they look to leap forward rather than play catch-up. This is only possible by adopting the latest technologies and tools disrupting today's defence landscape.

Today's battlefield is dramatically changing, and people, systems, and technologies must operate in a contested, congested, constricted, multi-domain environment. As a result, the systems and technology that need to be developed are getting extremely complicated and are essentially networked cyber-physical systems.

Nations such as India that are trying to acquire or build these new-age systems need to ensure they are compatible not only with current systems but also with future systems, and they face a challenging task. Hence, they are looking to adopt digital transformation best practices to be agile and innovative and reduce time and costs in the acquisition lifecycle.

The Role of Digital Engineering in Mission Success

Given this background, the ability to simulate the battlefield digitally through Digital Engineering and check for mission success metrics for the various key assets is critical. This will enable stakeholders like the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to check whether the technology and assets they plan to acquire or build can meet their mission success criteria, like successfully intercepting a hostile attack or surveilling a sensitive area.

The use of Digital Engineering has some significant implications upfront, like:

• Making sure that the requirements for different stakeholders are captured in the context of a coherent mission and are not at odds with each other, which in the past has been the norm.