DARPA launches first phase of "open source" vehicle design challenge

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) opened up registration for the FANG Challenges, a set of three next-generation military vehicle design competitions that will kick off in January, and will put tools based on approaches borrowed from software development and chip design in the hands of teams of engineers and designers. In an effort to reinvent how such complex systems are designed and built, DARPA is preparing for the first real test of its efforts to use open-source software and Web collaboration—with millions of dollars in prize money at stake.

The challenges are the first major milestone in a program that seeks to break the Department of Defense out of the decade-long process that has cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars to produce aircraft, vehicles, and weapons systems that often end up never being built. DARPA's Advanced Vehicle Make project has funded the development of a set of open-source design tools that allow engineers to use "correct-by-construction" approaches to designing complex systems, using the known characteristics of building-block components from a shared model library to validate a design before it is ever assembled.