Collaborative Design In Darpa'S Fang I Challenge

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created the Fast, Adaptable, Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) program to design and develop a new heavy, amphibious infantry fighting vehicle (IFV). DARPA, through the FANG program, is undertaking a radically novel approach to the design and manufacture of complex defense systems, and is hosting a series of prize-based design competitions. These are called the FANG Challenges, and their products will be progressively more complex vehicle subsystems, culminating in the design of a full IFV. They leverage the META design tools and the VehicleFORGE collaboration environment to significantly change the design experience and widen the aperture for design innovation. The META tool suite is a set of free, open source tools for compositional design synthesis at multiple levels of abstraction, design trade space exploration, metrics assessment, and probabilistic verification of system correctness. VehicleFORGE is an open source development collaboration environment for the creation of large, complex systems by numerous unaffiliated designers with the goal of democratizing the design innovation process by engaging several orders of magnitude more talent than the current industry model. This work summarizes the results from the first FANG challenge through analysis of participants, team structures, and the designs created.