Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Engineering Simulation Curriculum Development

This paper presents the ongoing Year 2 of digital engineering (DE) simulation curriculum development by a research team from the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC). This task, sponsored by the Defense Acquisition University (DAU), builds on the extensive DE research portfolio in SERC and leverages the existing literature in the systems engineering and DE communities. The goal of the research is to create a robust learning platform with relevant hands-on modeling and simulation experience that can be used to improve students’ DE proficiency levels across the workforce. Part of this research effort includes DAU’s partnership with SERC to develop a Simulation Training Environment for Digital Engineering (STEDE), which is intended to provide infrastructure and example case studies that allow DAU students to interact directly with models. The paper describes the curriculum development and modeling efforts to-date and addresses challenges associated with the development of the learning materials. An Advisory Board was established to provide guidance and expert knowledge in DE as the team is developing the DE curriculum. Working with the Advisory Board, the team discovered some critical skill gaps in DE which provide an opportunity for the team to further enhance the training and curriculum development to modernize the defense acquisition workforce.