IST’s researchers have been working with the Army and Air Force to develop tools to enhance autonomy in highly contested areas or Anti-Access Area Denial (A2AD) environments for air combat battle management that mitigate the challenges of growing, more sophisticated adversary threat systems. One of these tools, SPARTACUS (Self Protection and Reactive Technology), is an Advanced Combat Utility System which investigated the application of technologies, such as directed energy and kinetic weaponry in combination with coordinated vehicle maneuvers. It was used to defeat various types of threats in order to enable an air vehicle to defend itself while performing tasks in an access-denied airspace. IST is building complex, contested environments to train reinforcement learning-based aircraft control algorithms and evaluation autonomous sensor resource managers.

DCS has extensive experience in modeling and simulation of aircraft, missile, and combat vehicles down to the component level. Developing system simulations is a complex process requiring a high-level of software/system architecture experience to develop the construct and systems engineering expertise to define, control, and monitor system and subsystem interfaces and performance, so that the system being modeled behaves as close to the conceptual or actual system as possible. An example of our support in these areas evaluating air vehicle flight performance by using an in-house written Genetic Algorithm to perform post-flight analysis and comparison of flight test results to the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) cruise missile program simulation, and development of the Advanced Framework For Simulation, Integration And Modeling (AFSIM) software simulation framework for use in constructing engagement and mission-level analytic simulations for the Operations Analysis community.