The
value of modularity in ground vehicles to the Army and other
services has been a topic of much debate for decades. There are
instances of successful implementations of modularity in current
ground vehicle programs of record. However, these
implementations have generally been accomplished through
swappable mission equipment rather than large-scale
transformation of the vehicle and its core components.
Concurrently, the Army Science and Technology (S&T)
community has continued to demonstrate the technical feasibility
of large-scale, transformative ground vehicle modularity, but
the business case of modularity remains elusive. Decision
support tools are needed to enable Army leadership to
quantitatively assess the cost and benefits of modularity
compared to currently available mission-specific (conventional)
vehicle platforms.The goal of this project is to develop
modeling and simulation tools to evaluate the strategic
feasibility of a modular fleet compared to a baseline fleet
considering various aspects of a fleet operation including
manufacturing, transportation, performance, maintenance and
personnel requirements. The research considers only operational
aspects of modularity assuming the technical feasibility for
effective modularity is possible.
The scope of the project is a
high-level modularity where a relatively small set of module types
and their moderately many variants are assembled to create
different kinds of modular vehicles with significantly diverse
capabilities such as payload, range, vehicle cone index, etc. An
equivalent conventional fleet is modeled as well. For this study,
the fleet is limited to only medium and heavy tactical vehicles.
Also, the modules in this study are defined to match the
capabilities of the vehicles in the conventional fleet. Both a
conventional and a modular fleet are simulated under the same
operational scenario coming from TARDEC’s System of System
Analysis Tool (SoSAT).
As a result of the simulation, various fleet-level objectives are
evaluated to assess the cost and benefits of modular approaches.
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