Test & Evaluation (T&E), Certification and Systems Assurance is emerging as one of the most important Sovereign Defence Industrial Priorities (SDIPs).
It informs Defence’s risk-based judgements across all elements of the capability life-cycle and runs across all other SDIPs. By understanding what underpins Defence requirements, we can assess whether what we are buying meets our needs.
This will only become more important under the AUKUS agreement as we buy more capabilities from our partners. When you buy or commission a defence product, you expect it will deliver a certain capability and perform at a certain level. T&E effectively determines whether the product performs as it’s required to.
T&E, Certification and Systems Assurance is the key SDIP where Australia can maintain complete autonomy and Nova Systems is well placed to fill this role.
No one knows the Australian T&E environment better than us. We have the world class skills, local knowledge and experience, to help Defence realise capability quickly and more economically, working collaboratively with Government, industry and academia. And importantly to train the future workforce.
The Defence Industry Development Strategy acknowledges Australian industry needs to invest in T&E and understand the vital role it plays in the wider Defence T&E Enterprise. It also recognises a potential shortfall of 400 T&E practitioners in 2024, growing to 1000 by 2030.
Nova Systems has a proud history as an independent Australian owned and controlled entity and has actively invested in Australia’s T&E capability for two decades.
We have successfully exported to the global market through the delivery of T&E solutions via our UK, Norway, Singapore and New Zealand businesses.
We continue to invest in cutting edge technologies and digital toolsets, such as AI, modelling, simulation and synthetics aimed at delivering new innovative capability and bringing speed to capability development.
This is critical to ensuring our sovereign role as an independent assurance partner for industry and Government evolves with emerging technologies and integration requirements.
We see Digital Engineering and the use of synthetic environments as facilitating a new level of agility and pace in how Government and industry will achieve and deliver new warfighter capabilities.
Underpinning our digital drive is Nova Systems T&E Centre of Excellence. The foundational focus is to train and develop Australia’s urgently needed, expanded defence sector workforce.
Under the T&E Centre of Excellence banner, we have developed a world-first Advanced T&E Practitioners Course focused on teaching critical skills, including scientific test and analysis techniques to test systems-of-systems and integrated force assurance. The development of the course captures Nova’s 20+ years practical experience, combined with the latest thinking in digital mission engineering, AI and synthetics.
The course is being rolled out to Defence and other clients. Based on the latest best practices with a focus on assurance of autonomous and uncrewed systems, it teaches advanced theory of T&E techniques, and T&E modelling and simulation, using live mission systems during live test scenarios. This includes a practical element at the Australian Maritime College in Tasmania focused on autonomous underwater vehicles.
Expanding on this, Nova Systems has developed and tested cutting-edge AI technology to process sensor imagery from underwater vehicles to help detect anti-shipping mines. The tool examines sonar imagery collected from autonomous underwater vehicles and automatically notifies the operator if an object resembling an anti-shipping mine is present in the image.
Our broader investment in the complimentary fields of Digital Mission Engineering and Model-Based Systems Engineering is not only introducing greater technical rigour into T&E activities, but also empowering our future T&E workforce by providing them with innovative tools, resources, and opportunities to explore and apply their skills.
To find out more about our Centre of Excellence and T&E Advanced Practitioners course, see here.