ITEC 26: SimCentric's Interim Range Safety Tool nears IOC

A screenshot from SAF-FORESIGHT showing movement boxes, targets and tracking of participants in a live fire exercise with alerts highlighting dangerous locations. (SimCentric)

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is shortly due to declare Initial Operating Capability (IOC) for the Interim Range Safety Tool (IRST) programme, which is based on Australian software company SimCentric's SAF-Foresight software tool, Janes has learned.

In July 2025 the MoD awarded SimCentric a contract worth GBP3.8 million (USD5 million) for SAF-Foresight. It is a digitised 3D exercise planning, control and live-fire range safety intervention application supporting military training. It enables the user to plan and produce a digital safe operating range danger area trace that can be accessed at any point nationally or internationally.

Interviewed at the 2026 International Training Technology Exhibition and Conference (ITEC 26) held in London in April, Dr Adam Easton, SimCentric's CEO, told Janes that IOC for the IRST is “about a month out”, and full operating capability (FOC) will follow “later in the year [2026]”. He said that IOC will demonstrate the capability on a subset of small arms ranges in the UK plus some indicative ones overseas, and FOC will cover all of them.

Dr Easton said that SAF-Foresight, originally developed for the Australian Defence Force, has been customised for UK use. This means it is compliant with all relevant Joint Services Publication (JSP) doctrine, he said, adding that UK and Australian doctrines are similar. A specific area of customisation was the use of the British National Grid (BNG) for ranges within the UK rather than the military grid referencing system (MGRS) which is in use in much of the rest of the world.