Hadean and Cervus have secured a project with the U.K. Ministry of Defense (MoD)’s Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA), working with the British Army’s Headquarters’ Futures Team over the next 12 months to deliver ‘The Forge’ decision support system. The system uses a number of emerging distributed and spatial web technologies designed to solve DASA’s Simulating Future Battlespace Complexity challenge.
By leveraging the disruptive technology offered by smaller companies in Hadean and Cervus, the MoD is demonstrating a clear commitment to digitalization in its infrastructure. With new threats and domains changing battlespaces, emerging web 3.0 and spatial web technologies offer a crucial change in data automation and visualization. The large amount of information available today can be more readily harnessed to foresee scenarios and inform decision making.
The Forge solution will combine the highly scalable compute power offered by the Hadean Platform with Cervus’ ‘Hive 2.0’ analytics engine. Legacy systems and a number of incumbent processes remain inefficient within defense organizations. Most importantly, they often do not make best use of all available data. A number of decisions are generally made through lengthy deliberations between experts. These conversations may involve compromises, counter arguments and often subjective viewpoints. The nature of this process results in slow responses that can miss key deadlines and risk serious negative outcomes.
As an alternative to these prolonged considerations, The Forge will automate these processes and deliver accurate analyses in a far shorter time. It will use the Hadean platform as its core computation, scaling numerous simulations across distributed cloud environments. On the front end these simulations will be realized by Cervus and run through its analytics engine.
The Forge is a three pronged approach to delivering operational insights:
- Top down – from policy or operational drivers (planned capability/architectural innovation)
- Bottom-up – from lessons learnt and capability gaps (contingent improvement/incremental innovation)
- Solution-led – from technology opportunities, COTS/MOTS, or politically driven decisions (opportunity exploitation/ disruptive innovation)
It creates powerful, workable solutions by developing and testing innovative solutions to pressing strategic issues, capability gaps and operational optimization. The system injects agility into the strategic decision cycle, enabling continuous testing of concepts and the rapid development of capabilities and doctrine. It also enables effective outcomes to avoid technology shock, counter adversary and reduce operational risk across the breadth of operations
At a foundational level, the distributed cloud platform provided by Hadean does the computational ‘heavy lifting’, running and orchestrating simulations and interaction between them. Together with Cervus, Hadean’s technologies deliver a more automated approach that is currently defining emerging trends in IT.
“Defense is undergoing an infrastructural uprooting in the shape of distributed computing and web 3.0 technologies. This joint contract between Cervus and Hadean with the MoD demonstrates a commitment to digitalization in order to gain the technological upperhand by leveraging our combined solutions,” said Hadean CEO, Craig Beddis.
“In the same way that social interaction is changing in the form of the metaverse, single synthetic environments for the military are becoming more complex and immersive. Additionally, our platforms are enabling in depth analysis of defense scenarios, providing real time decision support to decision makers. Hadean’s scalability provides the compute power necessary for these demanding applications.”
Alan Roan, MD of Cervus.ai, added “Cervus are immensely proud to be working with our partners at Hadean. The compute power needed to run multiple simulations to quickly examine different courses of action has limited the way we deliver decision support to date. Integrating our analytics engine, Hive 2.0, with MAK and Antycip’s world class simulation products and Hadean’s distributed computing platform, will significantly reduce the associated costs and increase the speed of wargaming and experimentation. We also recognize training and operation applications in this capability, similar to those which we recently demonstrated at the recent Army Warfighting Experiment 21 and we look forward to prototyping at pace, alongside the British Army, supported by the excellent DASA team.”
