By Shawn Charchan, CANA Technical Director of Energy Solutions
As CANA's Technical Director of Energy Solutions, I also serve as the Modeling, Simulation, and Analysis (MS&A) Coordinator for several CANA clients. In that capacity, I have the privilege of working with the analytical leads of various pilot programs to ensure the composite group is capitalizing on work already completed and working with unity of effort. This ensures the collective body of work continues to expand in line with the client’s larger objectives. The analysis and research that CANA supplies often relies on modeling and simulation (M&S) when completing studies in support of pilots. M&S is a powerful, yet often misunderstood, tool that has many uses in the analytical realm; it can be used for applications spanning requirements analysis, to forecasting, to - in several instances -system impact assessments.
One of the challenges our teams face when performing pilots is the data we obtain is based on limited lab testing and/or field demonstrations comprising one or two of the systems being tested. M&S can provide the study team a rich synthetic environment in which 10s or 100s of the systems being tested can be represented as a digital twin in a virtual scenario, thereby enabling our study teams to explore the contribution fully fielded systems will (or will not) supply in the context of future warfare. The combination of real-world system testing combined with analysis in a synthetic environment has proven time and again to be an excellent method for obtaining the type of insights that help us engage external stakeholders, inform requirements, and ensure each pilot ends with success.
Shawn Charchan
Technical Director of Energy Solutions