May 1997, Volume 14, No. 5 ARPA's Virtual Manufacturing Project

The virtual prototypes will allow engineers to assess design issues early in the development cycle. Applying virtual prototyping solutions to the design of complex military and commercial systems has the potential to substantially reduce design cost, risk and time, while creating a better product that meets the customer's requirements.

Lockheed Martin was selected as lead systems integrator for Phase II of the SBD project after successfully using virtual prototyping in Phase I to evaluate ship design modifications. Phase II involves further developing SBD and integrating it into mainstream design processes used by the U.S. Department of Defense and industry.

Lockheed Martin has chosen Division Inc. (San Mateo, Calif.; http://www.division.com), a vendor of virtual reality technology and products, to participate in the SBD project. Division's primary role will be to write the code to interface its dVISE virtual prototyping software with the High Level Architecture (HLA), a new DoD protocol for collaborative design.

HLA is primarily being used for military simulations. Division will work with Lockheed to further develop HLA. For instance, one of the first experiments within the project uses a virtual prototype of a ship to determine a gun's field of fire.

Division will support all partners in the SBD project, as well as future customers that use dVISE within the SBD framework. Other SBD project participants include Electric Boat, Newport News Shipbuilding, SAIC, Naval Research Labs, University of California at Berkeley, and University of North Carolina.