On April 1, the U.S. Army released a small business innovation research (SBIR) broad agency announcement entitled Immersive Gaming of C5ISR Training and Testing. Proposals are due no later than 12:00 p.m. Eastern on May 18.
OBJECTIVE
Develop and demonstrate a material solution to provide adaptive, scalable, cost effective training and testing to improve the Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) system operations for the Army’s Signal Soldiers.
DESCRIPTION
The desired solution at completion will significantly improve (or revolutionize) the network systems training and testing (TT) for the Warfighters, and enable the adaptive, scalable and cost-effective TT to keep pace with the rapid advance of the technology. The solution will address planning, installing, operating, and maintaining techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) in the area of NetOps as well as the test and evaluation (T&E) on the hardware (HW) and software (SW) and other human machine interface (HMI) functions.
The solution will provide immersive 3D simulated tactical network systems, address both individual and collective tasks as well as a variety of common challenging scenarios faced by the Warfighters to enable warfighters to be trained and use the latest HW/SW in the simulated operational environment. The solution will use a Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) to enable integration of 3rd party vendors and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to produce software modules for their respective network systems.
The desired solution will enable users to set battle space scenarios, training collaboration between multiple-users, training with the latest HW/SW packages just clicks away, assess the HW and SW capabilities and provide the near-real time operational feedbacks to improve the products, shorten the product development-testing-training-fielding cycles, and ultimately reduce the field support costs for training and fielding through reduction of field support engineers.
BACKGROUND
Current NetOps training and testing activities are cumbersome, costly, long cycles and not adaptive to the hardware (HW) and software (SW) releases on the Army Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) network systems or the fast pace of the technology improvement. Signal Soldiers do not have the capability to master their cyberspace operations skills by practicing operational planning, IOM, and Battle Drills on a tactical network. Nor do they have the ability to train on the network with realistic operational scenarios.
In addition, the operational test feedback on Human Machine Interfaces of the network systems (both HW/SW) are not only limited but behind the technology advancement and release cycles. The solution, if successful, could potentially revolutionize the current training and testing process by providing an operational interface to simultaneously develop the user as a key component of the system of system.
Full information is available here.
Source: SAM
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