Elodie Collins
Government technology services firm EXPANSIA is looking into the model context protocol, or MCP, being offered by artificial intelligence company Anthropic to enable a truly integrated, AI-powered environment for digital engineering.
Enabling Integrated Digital Environments With MCP
EXPANSIA said in a Thought Leadership article posted Thursday that current integrated digital environments typically feature digital tools that are co-located on a shared infrastructure and are made to integrate via customized interfaces like scripts or file drops. Though the approach works, it does not scale easily and makes incorporating intelligent automated behavior difficult.
Anthropic’s MCP overcomes these limitations by providing a common interface protocol that lets tools expose their structure, state and context, enabling those tools to talk and cooperate with the help of AI agents.
Protocols like MCP could benefit offerings like EXPANSIA’s own SEEKR supply chain automation software, which works to determine the viability of U.S. Air Force aircraft parts for advanced manufacturing. With the help of an integration layer enabled by MCP, SEEKR could identify the critical aircraft parts, link them to relevant models, assess validation gaps and prompt the appropriate team to take action.
MCP’s Promising & Stand-Out Abilities
EXPANSIA notes, however, that MCP is “not a plug-and-play solution” and so requires the implementation of policy enforcement, orchestration logic and agent behavior. The firm is also still evaluating the viability of MCP for defense-related applications. Nevertheless, the protocol’s ability to simplify tool orchestration and AI automation “stands out” and its ability to improve modularity, reduce dependencies and onboard contextual AI agents “is promising.”
