DARPA Works To Speed Design, Simplify Manufacture

“No one could accuse the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of lacking imagination. But to rethink the entire design, development and manufacturing process used by aerospace for decades is ambitious, even for the agency that helped bring us GPS, the Internet and stealth. Under the Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program, Darpa is working to combine model-based design, virtual collaborative engineering and foundry-style manufacturing into an end-to-end process that cuts development timescales by a factor of five, eliminating the design-build-test-redesign cycle that is driving costs and delays. “It’s safe to say that the direction we have been going in military acquisitions is not a sustainable path,” says Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman, Darpa AVM program manager. “We simply can’t continue to spend more and get less for the money we spend.” More at Aviation Week