Developing SSE Technology Demonstrator for UK Strategic Command

UK technology company Improbable’s Defence business has been awarded a contract for a second year to further develop and extend a Single Synthetic Environment (SSE) Technology Demonstrator for UK Strategic Command, the major organisation of the British Armed Forces responsible for leading integration across all domains - cyber, space, maritime, land and air.

This award comes after the successful completion of an initial twelve-month contract to create a prototype SSE that supports a detailed simulation of a part of the real world. CAE helped establish the project in the first year, and will continue to support in the second year as a key technology partner in the SSE ecosystem, along with a growing number of ecosystem partners.

The second year will see the development and expansion of this prototype SSE into a cloud-based tool which will enhance users’ planning and decision-making. Improbable and UK Strategic Command will build upon the successful processes of joint development pioneered during the first year - embedding military personnel with the contractor in an integrated project team and using an ‘agile methodology’ which puts the military user at the centre of design and development.

This close collaboration ensures that UK Strategic Command can guide development, seizing the opportunity presented by new and innovative technology approaches to drive transformation while delivering high-tech projects that will help address some of the most pressing defence and national security challenges. The joint approach also ensures that UK Strategic Command can ensure and review the success of the trial while simultaneously engaging with wider industry to understand its readiness to support a potential SSE programme.

This new contract is complementary to the SSE (Training) project that Improbable is delivering for the British Army, which was announced in August 2020, and leverages the progress made by UK Strategic Command’s SSE project in its first year. Both projects will be built on Improbable’s synthetic environment platform, which is engineered to enable the fast and efficient development and integration of a range of interconnected synthetic environment applications - from collective training to decision support tools which augment planning processes - all operating on a common architecture.

The SSE being jointly developed by Improbable and UK Strategic Command delivers a simulation demonstrator which models the conventional physical domains (maritime, land and air) as well as aspects of space, cyber and the information environment. The simulation brings together models of physical elements such as weather, terrain and infrastructure networks with more abstract systems such as social, political and economic ones; and enables the exploration of the causal relationships and interdependencies between them.