Northrop Grumman has announced that it intends to bid as prime contractor in the competition for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) Objective Simulation Framework (OSF), which will integrate MDA's modeling and simulation architectures.

OSF is expected to be awarded in May 2011 as an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract with an estimated program value of $850 million.

The procurement will be managed by the Missile Defense Agency, Redstone Arsenal, Ala. The program will enhance the MDA's current modeling and simulation frameworks consisting of the Digital Simulation Architecture (digital) and the Single Stimulation Framework (hardware-in-the-loop).

The current frameworks integrate models from each of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) program elements into a system that accurately represents the performance of fielded BMDS equipment against a variety of threats in realistic environments.

The BMDS is a complex system of sensors, interceptors and a command and control, battle management and communications network. The integration of these many elements will enable a robust, layered defense to defend against a hostile missile in all phases of flight.

The desired OSF will leverage existing or mature capabilities and develop common interfaces to join digital and hardware-in-the-loop representations into a modular, scalable, reconfigurable and composeable system. The OSF program will also sustain the current frameworks/architectures until OSF is deployed.

"Modeling and simulation capabilities are becoming increasingly important to missile defense and OSF is crucial to MDA's ability to efficiently perform BMDS-level accreditation before transitioning the capabilities into the operational BMDS," said Karen Williams, vice president of Air and Missile Defense Systems for Northrop Grumman's Information Systems sector.

"Northrop Grumman is ideally positioned to lead this effort. To deliver a flexible, efficient and cost effective framework solution to the MDA, we will draw upon our more than 15 years experience solving the challenges of integrating the BMDS element models into comprehensive end-to-end system simulations."