New infrastructure, critical assets, and emerging technologies are reshaping our world and how we interact with it. One result of this evolution is a growing demand for spatial intelligence and spatial data, and for the ability to rapidly process it across industries.

For instance, consider the process of navigating Earth itself. The ability to do so accurately relies on extremely precise, up-to-date information. This is the sort of information provided by Vantor, a technology company that is “building the spatial intelligence infrastructure that allows customers to understand what is happening on Earth and increasingly in the space around it,” explains Vantor’s Chief Space Systems Officer, Matthew Jenkins.

The company’s software helps customers make better decisions and protect critical assets using accurate and fast spatial intelligence. Vantor’s living replica of Earth, for example, is a global-scale, interoperable spatial foundation that mirrors the real world with high precision and clarity. Government and commercial customers use this digital twin for mapping, visualization, analytics, and decision-making.

And in the rapidly growing space sector, Vantor’s WorldView Space capability uses visual intelligence to characterize satellites, debris, and other objects in low Earth orbit, helping better support mission-critical operations.

To keep pace with the increasing mission and system complexity involved in such projects, Vantor is scaling its next-gen satellites to include two advanced satellite systems: Vantor Vantage and Vantor Pulse. With this expansion, Vantor has encountered new engineering and operational challenges. Learn how the Vantor team incorporates digital engineering solutions from Ansys, part of Synopsys, to address them.

Overcome Scaling Challenges With Efficiency

As Vantor expands its imaging constellation, it has deftly addressed several key growing pains. These include data overload, accelerating customer requirements and technological advancements, and siloed insights that keep information from being viewed comprehensively. To solve these challenges, the company is taking three major steps:

Connecting sensors in space, air, and ground domains to create a common operating picture
Automating spatial intelligence via their advanced technology
Connecting systems to their digital twin of Earth to break down siloes and align all the data.

Previously, Vantor relied on internally developed tools to achieve these advancements. However, they became difficult to maintain as programs expanded. First, developing and maintaining solutions in-house required a great deal of time and resources that the Vantor team could devote elsewhere, such as to the engineering work itself.

Further, internally developed tools often become harder to maintain, validate, and transfer across programs as organizations grow. “Over time, you may concentrate critical knowledge in a relatively small number of people,” said Jenkins. “That creates organizational risk as well as engineering inefficiency.”

Vantor’s continuous growth and sophistication added difficulty to the situation, requiring the rapid scaling of associated models and simulations just to keep pace.

To address these challenges while increasing efficiency and adaptability, the Vantor team turned to trusted commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions. As Jenkins puts it, “the opportunity with Ansys is to standardize more of that underlying environment so our engineers can spend their time on the problems that actually differentiate Vantor.”

Maintain Market Leadership With Trusted Solutions

As Vantor’s systems become increasingly interconnected and complex, the company has turned to Ansys solutions to create a comprehensive digital engineering platform that enables engineers to collaborate and efficiently solve mission problems.

The platform is centered around the Ansys Systems Tool Kit (STK) digital mission engineering software for mission planning.

“STK (software) gives us a common and well-established environment for digital mission engineering, which transcends our internal needs and expands to our customers who in many cases also use STK (software) and various other Ansys engineering tools,” says Jenkins. He emphasizes that one of the biggest advantages of STK software is its connected workflow, which provides standard processes and connected tools for managing data and internal processes.

Connection is the name of the game with STK software. It can also solve system-level problems, from space to the ground, within a single solution while connecting mission modeling with systems architecture, high-fidelity physics, cybersecurity analysis, and engineering data management across the broader Ansys portfolio, including Ansys Minerva simulation process and data management (SPDM) software.

By moving from internally developed tools to Ansys software, the Vantor team can focus on unique engineering tasks that differentiate Vantor from its competitors. This increases efficiency, scalability, and collaboration, while reducing maintenance burdens and bridging the gap between engineering decisions and mission outcomes.

Jenkins emphasizes how using Ansys solutions to implement digital engineering at scale also enables engineers to create a digital thread and see how their choices affect system- and mission-level performance.

“For us, digital engineering is much broader than replacing one engineering tool with another,” says Jenkins. “It is about connecting people, processes, tools, models, and data so that engineering decisions can be made with better information and carried through the lifecycle of a system.”

This transformation will become even more essential as the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) changes the world of engineering. “AI is only as useful as the engineering foundation underneath it,” says Jenkins. “(With) a strong digital engineering foundation … engineering data is structured, connected, traceable, and accessible. AI can become a force multiplier for the engineering organization — helping our people evaluate more alternatives and make better-informed decisions at greater speed.”

In advancing its digital engineering and AI capabilities, Vantor will also empower its most important resource: its people.

“We want our engineers working on hard mission problems, making technical trades, exploring new architectures, and creating capabilities that do not already exist,” Jenkins explains.

Optimize Workflows With Digital Engineering

With the help of Ansys software, Vantor is creating a digital engineering solution that covers people, processes, tools, and data.

Specific benefits of this shift include:

Reducing risk, gaining resiliency, and improving repeatability by eliminating siloed knowledge and training engineers to use standardized processes and workflows.
Saving costs and accelerating workflows by enabling engineers to more quickly make informed decisions via a central source of truth with easily searchable and reusable data. For example, engineers can run analyses to ensure image quality in hours, not days, and make decisions twice as fast by running significantly more simulation cases — in some cases nearly five times as many, Jenkins shares.
Increasing engineering capabilities that accelerate the transition to a modern digital engineering platform. For instance, engineers can spend less time developing and updating in-house tools and more time on work that matters.

Collectively, these benefits can yield great commercial advantages, such as enabling informed decisions and addressing rapidly changing mission requirements faster. “It also gives us greater confidence as we make significant investments in next-generation systems,” adds Jenkins. “At that scale, improving verification, traceability, and engineering decision quality is not an academic exercise. It is fundamental risk management.”

Embrace Digital Engineering Transformation

Looking further out, “the long-term opportunity is to shorten the distance between an idea and an informed engineering decision,” says Jenkins. “In a connected digital engineering environment, engineers should be able to evaluate more alternatives, earlier in the lifecycle, using models and data that are accessible across disciplines.” While this doesn’t automatically produce better engineering, over time, he shares that this transformation should enable Vantor to more efficiently and quickly optimize its assets, respond to new requirements, and introduce new capabilities.

For others going through the same digital engineering transformation, Jenkins shares the following advice:

Treat this as an engineering transformation, not a software deployment.
Pay attention to the challenging questions that will arise around processes, data, ownership, and how engineers actually work.
Be thoughtful about when custom engineering is needed or if it is becoming a burden. Here, it can be helpful to consider adopting a COTS solution that will enable your engineers to refocus their experience and creativity on unique mission-imperative goals.

Want to learn more? Explore our collection of digital engineering resources, and find more details on accelerating mission readiness by registering for this webinar series.