Ahead of the virtual Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (vIITSEC), the world’s largest military training and simulation event to be held virtually beginning next week, CAE announced that it has been awarded a subcontract from Improbable for a second year to further develop and extend a Single Synthetic Environment (SSE) technology demonstrator for the United Kingdom’s Strategic Command, the major organization of the British Armed Forces responsible for leading integration across all domains — cyber, space, maritime, land and air.
The SSE aims to deliver a multi-domain virtual world to be used for operational planning and decision support.
This award comes after the successful completion of an initial twelve-month contract to create a prototype SSE that supports a detailed simulation of a part of the real world. CAE helped establish the project in the first year and will continue to support in the second year as a key technology partner in the SSE ecosystem.
“Together with Improbable, we are demonstrating that a combination of digital immersion technologies now exist that can replicate the scale and complexity of the real world in a synthetic environment,” said Andrew Naismith, Managing Director, CAE UK plc. “CAE is excited to be part of the development of the Single Synthetic Environment digital ecosystem that will create a transformational decision support tool to benefit the whole of the UK Government.”
The SSE delivers a simulation demonstrator which models the conventional physical domains (maritime, land and air) as well as aspects of space, cyber and the information environment. The simulation brings together models of physical elements such as weather, terrain and infrastructure networks with more abstract systems such as social, political and economic elements to enable the exploration of the causal relationships and interdependencies between them.
The SSE combines inputs from a diverse ecosystem of other technical applications, models and data, some of which are powered by cutting-edge data analytics and artificial intelligence/machine learning technologies. These technologies are supplied by ecosystem partners from across industry, government and academia, all integrated and hosted on Improbable’s synthetic environment platform.
The SSE has the potential to enable decision-makers at every level – from political to tactical – to test and rehearse policy choices and military courses of action in a rigorous, data-driven way. This will allow them to assess probable consequences with a far greater and more data-driven level of confidence than has previously been achievable.
The second year will see the development and expansion of this prototype SSE into a cloud-based tool which will enhance users’ planning and decision-making.
“Improbable is delighted to continue our work with the UK Strategic Command alongside CAE,” said Joe Robinson, CEO of Improbable’s Defence Business. “The Single Synthetic Environment is a unique and powerful capability with the potential to give Britain a truly competitive edge. In CAE, we have a world-class partner and we are looking forward to working together to deliver transformational capability in this second year of development.”
