Raytheon BBN Receives DARPA Contract for Resilient Supply-and-Demand Networks Modeling Tool Development

The Department of Defense is working to improve its global supply chain by adopting a new model that incorporates vulnerabilities affecting deliveries.

The department has awarded Raytheon BBN Technologies an $8 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract to build a modeling and simulation tool to analyze shocks to supply-demand networks, RTX said.

John Santini, Raytheon BBN principal investigator, said that vulnerabilities often arise from open, complex and evolving systems affected by external and internal factors, with decisions rarely based on resiliency.

The BBN simulator is expected to combine state-of-the-art economic macro-models of supply-demand networks with microeconomic and BBN process models.

The Resilient Supply-and-Demand Networks program aims to replace the supply chain concept with the phrase “supply-and-demand network, highlighting the strategic challenges of delivering materiel.

The contract is the second DARPA deal secured by the RTX business in 2023. In August, it received a contract to use cognitive interviewing techniques to understand how medical professionals make informed decisions in emergency response.