Digital Engineering: Expanding the Advantage

Digital transformation—the pervasive incorporation of digital technology into virtually every process and system—is arguably the greatest force of change within the naval engineering community. Digital innovation is disrupting traditional ship design paradigms and giving rise to new ways of modernizing and sustaining a future integrated force structure. This paper highlights digital transformation as a core strategic initiative that is aligned with the U.S. Department of Defense Digital Engineering Strategy. Recognizing the highly integrated nature of Model Based Systems Engineering, this paper will introduce a multi-factor framework developed by Scheurer (2018) to align traditional processes employed for physical system design and development with a new digital paradigm. Next, foundational elements required to evolve current engineering design and development processes, from event and document-based approaches to a model-based approach will be addressed. Finally, discussion will focus on efforts underway to leverage cutting-edge physics-based computational models to transform ship concept, design, and development processes through investment in high performance computing systems