The objective of this research is to develop digital redundancy methods for mission resilience of complex engineered systems with thigh hardware (HW) and software (SW) dependencies, specifically focusing on system sustainment and implementation of post-production design changes during operations. This objective will be pursued by creating a surrogate sandbox environment that includes a system representation (e.g., a customizable autonomous robotic navigator) and its mission environment (e.g., a maze with threats and objectives). This sandbox environment will be used to conduct rapid variant analysis and design tradeoffs. Further, it will serve as a digital-twin to develop analytical methods for test & evaluation, with an emphasis on how digital redundancy and mission resilience could be built into existing legacy platforms, on-site, through SW modifications; including AI-generated SW. This will provide a cost and scale efficient platform for building trust into complex systems against evolving mission requirements and operational environments. Methods will be generalizable to other systems with HW-SW dependencies.
