Three technological concepts will undergo testing in General Services Administration facilities through an initiative evaluating pre-commercial building technologies for federal government facilities. The Proving Ground program is established to help GSA create investment decisions through the demonstration of building technologies, the agency said Tuesday.

The selected concepts include a tool that performs hard water chemical alteration, a platform that changes heating and cooling systems’ operations and a technology that links storage devices and on-site energy generators to prevent conversion losses and direct current loads. The agency noted that it has deployed 15 technologies in over 500 facilities as part of the program.

Heather Wilson, secretary of the U.S. Air Force and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, spoke about the service branch’s space strategy during a recent event in London. She spoke in front of 200 stakeholders from government, commercial and academic communities at U.K.-based think tank Policy Exchange, USAF said Tuesday.

“We all prefer that space remains peaceful, because if war extends into space everyone loses,” she stated. Wilson said the Air Force is developing technology to prevent and address space conflict. The service branch seeks to work with allies to boost the defense of space assets, she noted. “With our joint services and allied partners, we are developing a global network of war-fighting capabilities and expertise,” Wilson said.

About the Wash100

The Wash100 award, now in its sixth year, recognizes the most influential executives in the GovCon industry as selected by the Executive Mosaic team in tandem with online nominations from the GovCon community. Representing the best of the private and public sector, the winners demonstrate superior leadership, innovation, reliability, achievement and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2019 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2019.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency looks to apply a centralized approach to managing cyber capability requirements to protect federal agency networks, FCW reported Tuesday. 

Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security component and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said he wants lawmakers and agency heads to consider cyber risk assessment and mitigation efforts in the budget process to streamline acquisition and coordination.

He added that he plans to continue CISA’s focus on mitigating election interference following Russia’s reported involvement in the 2016 presidential elections. Krebs noted that CISA will keep asking Congress to fund its election-related work through 2020.

Layne Merritt, head of U.S. Army’s Aviation Development Directorate, said the service plans to conduct a series of demonstrations for a new fleet of air-launched unmanned aircraft in the coming years, Defense News reported Tuesday. The service looks to develop a capability to deploy drones from a larger aircraft and perform advanced manned-unmanned teaming for reconnaissance, surveillance, long-range targeting, attack, decoy, resupply and casualty evacuation missions.

“This is a new class of weapon system,” Merritt told Defense News. “The cool thing about the air-launched effects is that now, instead of standoff jamming or standoff effects, we can have stand-in effects. Instead of being 100 kilometers away… we may be 100 meters away, and that’s going to change the type of payloads, but also may be more effective.”

He noted that the Army will work with industry to develop the air-launched drones. The service plans to begin testing the unmanned aircraft this fall aboard a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flying at a lower altitude, about 100 feet or less, Merritt said. 

The next demonstration is expected at the end of fiscal year 2020, where the Army will deploy an unmanned “mothership” with multiple air-launched drones for reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition. An autonomous attack demonstration, testing of decoys and electronic warfare capabilities and integrated air defense system interference would follow by FY21 and later years. 

The U.S. Navy demonstrated the use of a prototype virtualization-driven missile defense system during an exercise off Virginia’s coast. Guided missile destroyer USS Thomas Hudner used the Aegis Virtual Twin system to destroy an incoming target, verifying the missile defense platform’s capacity to operate with radars and missiles, Naval Sea Systems Command said Tuesday.

The Virtual Twin serves as a prototype of the future Aegis Virtual Combat Management System. The Navy’s Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems equipped USS Thomas Hudner with a small-sized version of the virtual twin. Future versions of the system would be small enough to allot space for more technologies aboard the ship.

“Delivering warfighting power to the hands of our sailors is our mission, and breaking the paradigm of hardware-software dependent deliveries is a major step toward rapidly delivering that warfighting power,” said Capt. Todd Boehm, major program manager for the Aegis combat system.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology developed a toolkit to improve safety tests for software used in critical activities such as transport and power plant operation, NIST said Tuesday. The Automated Combinatorial Testing for Software toolkit enables software developers to mitigate the input of simultaneous code combinations which may result in critical glitches that pose threats to safety. 

NIST is working to integrate ACTS, which deploys a new version of the Combinatorial Coverage Measurement tool, with an algorithm developed by Austria-based SBA Research that can process input variables of up to five-way combinations. The algorithm, used together with ACTS, can extend the latter’s variable capacity to thousands.

“We can apply this method to more applications and systems that previously were too hard to handle. We’d invite any company that is interested in expanding its software to contact us, and we’ll share any information they might need,” said Richard Kuhn, a computer scientist for NIST.

Recently, Adobe used NIST and SBA Research’s software testing algorithms to conduct reliability assessments for one of the company’s software packages.