OSF Contract Awarded

The Missile Defense Agency today awarded Teledyne Technologies Inc.'s Huntsville, AL-based subsidiary Teledyne Brown Engineering a contract worth up to $595 million over the next five years to work on the Objective Simulation Framework program.

OSF will integrate MDA's modeling and simulation architectures for the Ballistic Missile Defense System. Work will begin Sept. 1, according to a company statement. Further:

Under the contract, Teledyne will design, develop, test, implement and maintain the OSF.  It will be the centerpiece test and simulation framework for all elements of the missile defense system.  The OSF will be capable of supporting full scale simulations, ground tests and live fire events.  For the first time, it will tie together the Digital Simulation Architecture with the Single Stimulation Framework.

"Winning this significant contract reflects well on our capabilities for designing and developing test systems for complex applications such as missile defense," said Robert Mehrabian, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Teledyne Technologies. "We expect similar test technologies will have use in other markets we serve including energy, marine, aviation, space and environmental applications."

Teledyne Brown developed the first digital and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HWIL) test and assessment capabilities for missile defense. Through the years, Teledyne Brown developed and supported advancements in test frameworks that established ground test standards for missile defense systems. The company also developed an OSF prototype that incorporates legacy digital and HWIL capabilities to support Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) test and assessment activities.  Teledyne Brown has executed BMDS tests and assessments at its headquarters in Huntsville, Ala. and at other locations.

One of the teams Teledyne beat out for the contract was a Northrop Grumman-Boeing one. As Inside Missile Defense reported in March:

A Northrop Grumman executive told Inside Missile Defense earlier this month that the company's proposed partnership with Boeing was meant to "cause the least disruption" to MDA as the agency consolidates its Digital Simulation Architecture program -- developed by Northrop -- with the Single Stimulation Framework effort being developed by Boeing.

"The OSF program will enhance and integrate these current frameworks into a system that accurately represents the performance of fielded BMDS equipment against a variety of threats in realistic environments," the Northrop statement reads.

"Missile defense calls for flexible, high-fidelity simulations that are affordable. OSF is crucial for increasing the cost-effective role of modeling and simulation in verifying and certifying BMDS performance," Kelley Zelickson, vice president of Air and Missile Defense Systems for Northrop Grumman Information Systems, said in the statement. "In response, we have assembled an extraordinarily talented, comprehensive and balanced team to offer the best value with our proposal. We will perform the work in Colorado Springs and Huntsville, and collectively, we bring unmatched experience with BMDS elements and legacy architectures, niche expertise and innovation to deliver a modular, scalable and reconfigurable system to the MDA."

"The Northrop Grumman-Boeing team is committed to working with the MDA to achieve an optimized, common framework that will reduce the costs associated with modeling and simulation while enhancing the ability to evaluate new ballistic missile defense capabilities," Zelickson added.