This has been a typical week for me in the Modelling, Simulation & Synthetic Environments (MSSE) team, switching between our own MSSE portfolio development work and supporting both the Capability Development and Market Intelligence Cell (MIC) teams in developing simulations of scenarios and use cases providing visualisations of future UK defence export capabilities.
We have run two internal workshops using the Innovation and Collaborative Engagement laboratory (ICE Lab), with a few cases of the UKDSC team trying out the collaboration toolset and white boarding application on the touch surface – some users more successfully than others! We’ve also hosted a couple of external stakeholder visits and used the ICE Lab for engaging with SMEs including one of our visualisation software SMEs to demonstrate some of the new capabilities that will be available for UKDSC Communities of Interests (CoI) to use. This should significantly enhance the ability for the ICE Lab to visualise the impact of new UK technologies and defence capabilities into future export markets.
Work continued on developing the baseline scenarios and battlespace representation to test out the concepts that are being worked up around Surveillance capabilities. I had an away day with my Airbus Defence and Space Engineering leadership team and finished the week off by meeting one of our CoI members, an SME simulation organisation, to review the technical developments that have taken place under the Agile, Immersive Mission training innovation challenge. We will have one of the innovation challenge winners in next week to discuss how the ICE Lab can support their efforts going forward, and I’m also supporting World Space Week (www.worldspaceweek.org) by presenting and giving talks to a School – and hopefully enthusing some students to understanding that there is a lot to be gained from a career in science and engineering!
Afzal Ali – Expert, systems engineering and synthetic environments on secondment to the UKDSC from Airbus Defence and Space
