ST Engineering Antycip Fuels Defence Research Project

ST Engineering Antycip leveraged MAK Technologies’ MAK ONE suite of modelling and simulation tools and lent its technical expertise to the European Union as a partner of the Open Cooperation for European mAritime awareNess (OCEAN 2020), the largest EU-funded defence research project within the union’s Preparatory Action on Defence Research (PADR).

The three-year, €35 million OCEAN 2020 project, which concluded recently in Brussels, paved the way for future EU naval collaboration by showing how new and existing technologies – including unmanned systems, combat management systems (CMS), naval communications and maritime operation centres – may be used to enhance situational awareness in a maritime environment. OCEAN 2020 was implemented by the European Defence Agency (EDA) and coordinated by aerospace, defence and security company Leonardo, which oversaw a consortium comprising ST Engineering Antycip and 41 other companies, universities and research institutes, as well as national navies and ministries of defence.

Modelling and simulation (M&S) played a crucial role throughout the project, with partners modelling operational concepts to validate the OCEAN 2020 architecture, including simulated sea trials that built upon live demonstrations in the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. ST Engineering Antycip played a crucial role in these simulated trials (part of WP3, one of the six ‘work packages’ that comprised the project), providing technical support on network simulation, scenario generation and 3D visualisation to the WP3 consortium.

Key objectives of the WP3 simulated trials included de‐risking: assessment of the manned and unmanned system platforms ahead of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea live trials; complementing: analysis of systems’ resilience under severe environmental conditions and the involvement of multiple assets; and integration: evaluation of new technologies enhancement as advanced data/video processing and swarm algorithms.

To meet these goals, the OCEAN 2020 partners turned to ST Engineering Antycip and its sister company MAK Technologies to supply and support MAK's specialist M&S software, including its flagship simulation network technology, VR-Link.

VR-Link was paired with the MAK RTI, a high-performance HLA run-time infrastructure, to support the OCEAN 2020 HLA EVOLVED exercise simulation – for which ST Engineering Antycip developed a common federation object model (FOM) data structure exchange – while VR-Forces, MAK’s computer-generated forces (CGF) solution, was used to simulate the live trials in the Mediterranean and Baltic. MAK’s VR-Vantage was also involved in 3D scene visualisation and simulation for the simulated trials.

The ST Engineering Antycip team provided support to MBDA, which, as a system simulation activity leader, conducted several tasks including CGF scenario customisation and 3D sensor video streaming visualisation through the STANAG protocol (NATO analogue video standard).

Having achieved its operational, cooperative and technical objectives –  including three simulated trials, two live sea trials, and the first-ever simultaneous multinational demonstrations involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones), rotary UAVs, unmanned surface vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles, and remotely operated underwater vehicles – OCEAN 2020 has been hailed a success by the EDA and the European Commission, with the project expected to demonstrate the potential of EU-funded research for defence applications, as well as boosting EU industrial capacity in military unmanned systems.