• Applicants must be a UK based registered company, or prove they have an establishment in the UK and undertake the majority of their activity in the UK.
• Applicants must have a UK business bank account for any payments to be made.
• All work for this programme (including via any sub-contractors) should be undertaken in the UK.
• All applicants must hold the Cyber Essentials certification (or equivalent).
• Applicants must be able to receive £115,000 in State Aid.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is facing challenges in equipment availability due to long lead times, part obsolescence, and limited flexibility in traditional manufacturing approaches. To help address this, the MoD are actively exploring additive manufacturing technologies to increase the agility of parts manufacture. For additive manufacturing to be effective, the MoD and their manufacturing supply chain need the ability to securely create, configure, store and share manufacturing data to enable parts to be produced at local, remote and distributed manufacturing hubs.

Currently, the MoD is limited in its ability to see all the design information for parts they might need for repairs across their various machinery. Manufacturing data is fragmented, held privately by the OEMs in isolated systems with ad hoc sharing methods. This limits visibility, standardisation, and access to the associated Technical Data Packs (TDPs) needed for the integration with additive manufacturing processes. Feedback loops are weak, hindering continuous improvement. A consolidated, secure platform is needed to access, share, and deploy this data across its supply chain.

The MoD is looking to explore and identify which technologies can allow the secure extraction, transmission, presentation, and use of TDP metadata to authorised supply chain stakeholders.

The Defence Testbed Accelerator is searching for up to five tech SMEs who can develop proof-of-concept solutions to solve one of two challenges:  

1. Collecting design information metadata from various Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems into a consolidated platform 
2. Building the consolidated platform to allow people to view, access, and share all the data in one place, on a permissioned basis 

To validate solutions built as part of the testbed, participants of the programme will benefit from a specially developed testbed, designed to provide access to simulated real-world manufacturing environment without disruption to day-to-day operations of the MoD and its partners. Participants will explore the ‘art-of-the-possible’ for secure data exchange across the UK’s additive manufacturing landscape, to explore how separated and disperse data can be standardised, consolidated, and made visible via a federated digital inventory. 

Specifically, this testbed aims to explore what technologies can be used to secure access to disparate PLM systems and make the TDP information within them discoverable by people who need the information across the supply chain.

For this challenge, the testbed requires up to three tech SMEs who can build connector-layer software capable of pulling data from manufacturing design systems in the testbed representing different OEM PLM software systems and exposing output metadata regarding these datasets in a standardised format. 

This metadata will be used to create a federated digital inventory of all available components across the supply chain. The connector-layer will also allow appropriately authorised users to remotely retrieve the TDP data from the PLM systems. 

The developed TDP connector must be capable of interrogating one or more simulated OEM TDP repository (representing real-world PLM systems), enabling the retrieval of PLM data and synthesis and exposure of metadata in a standardised format for the creation of the distributed digital inventory (the direction of operation could be a push or a pull as the participant deems fit given the requirements).  

The proposed TDP connector may reside anywhere that is appropriate to standard security principles for a system that is entirely under the control of the owner of the PLM system, exposing only the endpoints for communication of metadata with the digital inventory, and TDP datasets to authorised remote parties.

For this challenge, the testbed requires up to two tech SMEs who can develop a federated inventory solution, communicating standardised metadata surfaced from the various connection layer software solutions into a single viewing plane of headline TDP information (i.e. key TDP attributes) suitable for a digital inventory User access configuration and controls should be considered, as well as the visibility of data within the digital inventory via the connector software.

The TDP digital inventory should: 

• Interact with multiple PLM connectors adhering to a standardised API 

• Display all collated information within a unified and standardised User-Interface 

• Have access controls for visibility of contents for 4 different actor classes (MoD, TDP originating OEM, second OEM, Additive Manufacturer) 
• Expose a standardised API for querying contents

• Funding – £100,000 in grant funding to design and develop challenge-focused PoC solutions within the testbed environment
• Industry partnerships – Build and expand relationships across key stakeholders within the UK’s defence sector, working closely with the Ministry of Defence and key industry partners (Thales, RBSL, Babcock, NP Aerospace)
• Technical mentorship – Access to Digital Catapult’s technical experts to support solution development and push the boundaries of the art-of-the-possible, including systems architecture, security, and integration advice
• Validation & visibility – Test and demonstrate your technology solution in a simulated real-world environment
• Other benefits – Networking opportunities, peer-to-peer learning and the opportunity to pitch the solution at the accelerator showcase event in 2026