Contested Logistics Operations Using Digital Support

Conflict in the 21st century has become increasingly contested in all domains, leaving many militaries operating in a Logistics Under Attack context. In this context, three notable advancements are pursued: First, digital twins of assets to predict component failures; Second, an improvement in communications through Joint All Domain Command and Control; Third, logistics operation improvements through Agile Combat Employment. Current research efforts analyze these components in a point-design approach, looking at the effects individually. This research provides a capability to understand the synergistic effect of these approaches combined in a single modeling and simulation environment. These three advancements were modeled through a parametric analysis of eighteen input variables to analyze the effects on key metrics like component time on shelf, aircraft turnaround time, and total time elapsed for an operational vignette. An interactive, parametric decision-support environment was developed to aggregate simulation results for analyzing the influences of the three advancements in the vignette. This environments provides researchers with the ability to rapidly evaluate tradeoffs between the advancements without having to rely on complex simulations to compute cases. It provides both a bottom-up and a top-down approach, from filtering the outputs to understand what inputs provide the desired end-state, to also being able to select various inputs and arrive at output metrics. Key conclusions for the vignette of interest include a requirement to increase communication capacity far beyond current capabilities of Link-16, raising Digital Twin fidelity to support mission readiness, and balancing the number of aircraft and bases in an Agile Combat Employment scenario, as both exhibit competing effects on part delivery. Future work includes conducting requirements verification, leveraging Systems Tool Kit (STK) for dynamic route visualization, and exploring additional effects on the digital environment such as required compute power and Zero Trust.