A collaborative engineering environment for 21st century avionics

Abstract

Collaborative engineering and virtual prototyping is the application of advanced distributed modeling and simulation and engineering tools in an integrated environment to support technology development, system design, performance, cost, and producibility trade-off analyses throughout the entire product and system engineering life cycle. The Sensors and Information Directorates, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have initiated a major effort to implement a Collaborative Engineering Environment (CEE) to provide the infrastructure and development methodology required for affordable and timely avionics for the 21st century warfighter. The CEE concept is a major cultural change in the technology development process that involves applying state-of-the-art simulation and information sharing technology to the way we do business. CEE enables partnerships among the laboratories, industry, and the warfighter to accelerate the development and transition of leading edge technology to the operational weapon systems.