The ARES submarine project - A sandpit for industry digital transformation and workforce upskilling in Australia

Abstract

In 2020, the world tripped due to a virus which also impacted all Defence Shipbuilding programs. Dearth of resources, personnel, funding and jamming of our overseas connections disrupted the submarine world. How could those committed to developing the Australian sovereign capability keep moving forward? Imagination and innovation. Thanks to a Defence SA grant in 2020, a collaborative research team of Australian universities and industry partners had developed a feasibility study for ARES, the Australian Research and Experimental Submarine as a free running model. At the 2020 SIA Conference, the DST Chief scientist acknowledged the great work achieved by the ARES Team and the relevance of the topic to SEA1000 but the question became “where to from there and how do we secure future funding?”. This is why, building on the success of the project, we continued the development to the benefit of Defence but with a focus on two aspects of the eco-system: • Workforce upskilling, • Digital transformation. In other words: developing capability for the Defence industry from a people and tools perspective. In an era where the Industry 4.0 and digital twins are the buzz words, we have tried to put them into a real perspective by applying them to our project. The questions and challenges we have faced are about working together and in a consistent way: how can the software environment work and speak one voice? How do the people speak one voice or about the same submarine and deliver up to requirements? How can the food chain work efficiently from suppliers to production? And finally: what do the Customer and Primes want from Academia in that context?