BAE Systems Receives New DARPA Contract to Further Develop Multi-Domain Mission Planning Software

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded BAE Systems a phase two contract to continue developing a software solution that will support semi-autonomous, multi-domain mission planning within the Pentagon.

The $6.5 million second phase award is under the Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs program and comes after the company completed a demonstration during the project’s first phase.

The software under development is called the Multi-domain Adaptive Request Service, BAE said.

The phase one demonstration focused on the ability of the software to update a plan in real time during a live exercise. The ability was enabled by ingesting information feeds to track the state of planned tasks before generating options to adapt the plan to insert new tasks, the company explained.

The second phase will focus on maturing and advancing the software to scale up its capabilities.

To allow the Department of Defense to make better decisions, the software will provide an ability to automatically identify available assets in various domains. Afterward, operators will be able to assess the costs and benefits of using the identified assets when adapting a particular mission task.

According to the defense contractor, the ultimate goal of the project is to demonstrate the software’s techniques in a full-scale, operationally realistic environment.

The software development is spearheaded by BAE’s FAST Labs, with support from Carnegie Mellon University and Uncharted Software.