Theme: Training and Simulation MT 2/2022 · 13 Improbable’s software platform allows organisations like MoD and third-party industry players like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin, to build more advanced, more adaptable, more accessible synthetic environments, more quickly and more cost-effectively. Apple’s iPhone and App Store offer a useful but imprecise analogy. iPhone users get fast, cheap access to precisely the apps they want – regardless of who makes them. It also gives a vast network of app developers access to iPhone users all over the world.This approach – a platform-enabled ecosystem, in which the platform (the iPhone) supports the ecosystem of developers (via the App Store) – is one that’s been proven time and again. It has transformed other industries and sectors, from commerce (Amazon, eBay) and travel (Uber, airbnb) to entertainment (Netflix), reducing costs, mitigating risk and incentivising innovation. The benefits of these virtual worlds or simulations are: • condensing all available knowledge and expertise into a single system, raising confidence in the quality of the debate, and thus the quality of the decision; • real-time or accelerated decision-making or, as important, decision rehearsal, previously the advantage of totalitarian regimes in which hierarchy short-circuits debate. We can now maintain our culture of challenge, debate and collaboration, while moving just as fast as our adversaries; • easier collaboration across teams, departments and organisations, because the same picture can be shared from HQ to field; • lower costs, including direct benefits in the form of reduced software/hardware maintenance costs and reduced development costs resulting from the reusability of models and applications, as well as indirect benefits from the increased usage of synthetic training, testing and evaluation and enhanced planning and decision-making across domains (see EY report); • rapid creation of a model for a new situation; • the network effect of a marketplace that promotes the development of new models and improvement of existing models for specific dimensions (eg infrastructure, public sentiment, disease spread or control, etc). Indirect Quantitative Benefits of c£1,000-1,470 million from, for example, increased usage and efficiency of synthetic training, testing and evaluation and enhanced planning and decision-making across domains/Defence Lines of Development (DLOD’s) enabled by a more realistic and efficient SSE. [Extract from Single Synthetic Environment Platform for the MoD – Summary Impact Assessment, June 2021, Ernst & Young LLP] MilTech: Are we talking greatest utility here in training (instilling and practising skills), education (changing mindsets, inspiring lateral thinking and problem-solving) or mission planning and rehearsal? Or all three? JR: All three. They all work together, feed into each other. Your plans feed into your training. The results of your training feed into your plans. Experimentation and exploration in the virtual world can generate insights and reveal unexpected consequences that aid problem-solving. ‘Off the wall’ ideas can be tested safely, assumptions confirmed or overturned. There’s a fourth element, too: mission implementation. Once your plan is activated and the situation develops, new information comes to light. We can feed this into the model. Users can keep exploring ‘what-ifs’ with accelerated time frames to adapt their plans fast enough to be relevant to the situation on the ground. Like Narnia, time moves in the simulation much faster than time in the real world; a week in the virtual world can be simulated in a matter of hours or minutes. MilTech: Many thanks for a fascinating insight into the world of the SSE. We look forward to seeing and discussing practical applications in more depth at IT2EC. Improbable is helping people at every level and across government and defence to pull all of this together – to put the latest, most effective, most reliable tools and technologies from across industry and academia in the hands of government and defence users. So yes – COTS (and GOTS) products are all very much part of the solution. MilTech: Is there a (relatively) simple wholesale ‘fix’ – or are multiple BandAids the only viable approach? Is complete recapitalisation of systems required? Or even feasible? JR: Let’s turn this question on its side. Our approach - an open platform - is to support all modelling/data technologies, and make them quickly available to all users, while minimising friction. There has never been a marketplace like this before. This reduces the need for – and the costs of – recapitalisation of systems: it recycles existing ones, and makes it easier for new ones to be incorporated, thereby increasing and extending the value of existing investments made by government and industry. MilTech: Explain ‘digital backbone,’ ‘digital twin’ and ‘single synthetic environment’ for the layman, please: advantages, benefits, resource costs, barriers to be overcome for implementation. JR: Our governments and defence organisations are struggling to keep up with increasingly fluid, fast-moving and interconnected threats. Both Russia and China have been investing in planning and decision-making automation since 2015, with the Russian YeSU-TZ programme seeking to deliver planning output within six hours, in order to stay ahead of the NATO/US planning processes. We know from the Integrated Review and Integrated Operating concept that there’s a widespread understanding of this challenge, and an equally widespread commitment to overcoming it. Which is why the UK MoD, for example, is transforming so much of its business from the back office right to the front line. The Digital Backbone is the technological infrastructure that will enable this transformation, connecting personnel at every level and across organisations, to improve understanding, analysis and decision-making. At Improbable (and elsewhere) we use the term ‘digital twin’ to refer to a virtual representation of a real-world system. This might be a building, or even an entire city. It might be a communications network, a supply chain or a power grid. It could also be a more abstract system, like an economy. The digital twin lets you explore and enhance the real-world system, to manage it when parts of it break down, and to plan how best to develop it. A single synthetic environment is a virtual, or computer-generated world, in which all these systems come together. On one level, it replicates the real world with a high degree of complexity and sufficient fidelity to provide valuable insights for anyone using it. A user can explore almost any aspect of that world, in order to train, to plan, to experiment, to prepare for the future. You can also run this simulation forward in time to explore the ‘what-ifs’ of any course of action. It doesn’t predict the future – but it can reveal likely consequences of specific actions. How you choose to experience a synthetic environment depends on what you want to get from it. If you’re planning logistics, or looking to understand demographics, you may want to view it in terms of graphs and data. If you’re planning a humanitarian operation, you may want to see a digital map. If you’re overseeing a specific mission, you may choose a 3D aerial view of the environment. And if you’re rehearsing for that mission, you and your team may want to experience this virtual world from a fully immersive first-person point of view, via a pair of VR goggles. Until now, governments and defence organisations have been forced to rely on siloed synthetic environments: slow and expensive to develop, these environments don’t interact with each other, and can’t be adapted as a crisis unfolds. They’ve also had to choose from a limited range of suppliers, who have, by and large, had to supply all the components themselves – data, models, AI and machine learning technologies – not to mention the simulators that allow, for example, trainee pilots to access the synthetic environment.
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