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03 Nov 2025
Our SAFTI City team took home the IES Prestigious Engineering Award for delivering a next-generation smart training facility for the SAF!
Announced at the IES 59th Annual Dinner on 3 November 2025, the award recognises outstanding engineering projects and achievements in Singapore.
Director Simulation and Training Systems Yeoh Ee-Wen (left) received the award from IES President Er. Chan Ewe Jin (right) at the dinner.
Working with the Singapore Army and ST Engineering, the team delivered an integrated training ecosystem where infrastructure and smart technology worked seamlessly together to provide a realistic, immersive, and versatile training environment to strengthen the SAF’s urban operation capabilities. Multiple urban features – including offices, malls, a school, a hotel, an immigration checkpoint and more – were incorporated to replicate a town region for training. Swing panels were also employed to vary building layouts and road networks to ensure that no mission undertaken by trainees stayed the same. Innovative construction design was also used to keep costs low without compromising training realism. For instance, an integrated “underground” complex was built above ground, while still providing the realistic experience of an underground MRT interchange. Hollow false facades were built on top of buildings or on the ground to create a “high rise” effect.
A view of SAFTI City.
Beyond infrastructure, what further brought SAFTI City to life was the use of many smart training systems to provide challenging urban training scenarios for soldiers. Interactive targetry tested soldiers’ response times, and battlefield effects such as explosions, smoke and sound simulated real-word combat conditions. The buildings equipped with over 11,000 sensors not only allow real-time tracking of soldier movements for improved performance analysis but also allow “shoot-through walls” to register hits from weapons and provide less cover for soldiers once “damaged”. Finally, an Exercise Control System (EXCON) was designed as a one-stop system that allows Army exercise planners to oversee training missions, or to adjust scenarios on the go such as the control of interactive targets and battlefield effects. Training performance data is also collated and processed by an analytics system to provide feedback to troops on their individual and collective performances.
The EXCON system.
The winning team at the awards ceremony.
On winning the award, Senior Programme Manager (Simulation and Training Systems) Lee Shinhan shared: “Behind SAFTI City is a team that is committed to delivering the best for the Army and its servicemen. We had achieved this through the close partnership that DSTA has with the Army and our industry.”
He added: “We are honoured that SAFTI City and the team’s effort has been recognised by Singapore’s engineering community through this award from IES. It is a testament to our work and that DSTA remains at the forefront of engineering in Singapore.”