Phenix Finishes Digital Engineering Phase 1
September 14, 2022
Our team at Phenix Solutions has completed another Phase I contract with the US Air Force. Daniel Wright, Director of Airworthiness and Certification, proudly stated, "Our Digital Engineering Phase I has successfully completed and have submitted for the Phase II Digital Engineering program with the USAF." He continued, "The techniques and takeaways of this contract will be bolstered by the Phase II work and will benefit Military, Government, and Commercial end-users in terms of reducing costs of our program with a focus on reliability and safety. The Phase I project has been a tremendous educational and practical exercise which created significant results and a solid foundation for moving onto Phase II and the rest of our development program."
The Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Autonomous Systems Technology Office (AST) is focused on accelerating the development and deployment of a transformative vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Digital engineering is essential to this mission as it helps meet the commitment to airworthiness by capturing, organizing, tracking, analyzing, and validating representative UAM system architectures and requirements.
To achieve a high degree of confidence in our Phenix Solutions systems, we must gain early visibility into the complete lifecycle of requirements. This includes Air Force and civil definitions, designs, implementation, verification, and validation. We also need to understand how conditions interact throughout our product lifecycles to ensure safety-critical interfaces are properly designed and verified.
Our strategy was based on meeting the AFRL's primary goals:
Identify digital engineering artifacts to support airworthiness
Explore state-of-the-art and readily accessible digital engineering processes and tools
Accelerate airworthiness for transformative vertical takeoff and landing aircraft
Provide them a partner in industry to engage the USAF in digital engineering practices.
Phenix has teamed with another local Oregon agency Galois, to conduct the modeling for the generation of an Ultra 2XL digital twin incorporating digital parts with real MTBF, MTTF, and life limit calculations, a digital library, and cyber hardening. A digital twin will provide:
Updated real-time data.
Machine learning.
Program-based reasoning for decision-making will help create best practices for flight and maintenance training.
The Phenix team managed this project expeditiously and produced an impressive result which has positioned us for a quick award of a Digital Engineering Phase II contract.