Berlin, 19 October 2026. Software for military deployments is often built for staffs, spreadsheets and reporting chains. Relay starts with the soldier on the ground who needs to know where to drive. Today MKS tested the application on the yard at the Marienpark in Berlin, from planning to evaluation.
- Relay ran as a complete application: planning in the control room, the field client on the phones, the picture in real time.
- The phones keep working without a network and sync as soon as a connection is back.
- What the test showed has already gone into the software.
At the gate the marshaller scans the label behind the windscreen, and the driver's phone shows the assigned lane in large type with a site map from the entry. Nothing more is needed: few buttons, one action per screen. On departure one button is enough, and the control room sees the new status on the map immediately.
A running application, not a click-through prototype
Relay was tested the way it is meant to run in operation. The control room did the planning: import the vehicle list, draw the area on the satellite image, distribute the vehicles across the lanes, simulate the flow. On the yard the phones ran the field client, even without a network, and reported every step back in real time. At the end, dwell time, throughput and punctuality came straight from the reports on the ground, each one in the tamper-proof event log.
How MKS works
At MKS, software for the armed forces is not built at a desk. The team works in short cycles and tests early where the work will happen: with marshallers at the gate, drivers in the vehicle and planners in the control room. Whatever snags in the test gets changed right away. Since the field test, for example, Relay registers vehicles that are on no list directly at the entry. The yardstick is the user: a marshaller should learn Relay in a day, a driver in an hour.
From Yarded to Relay
This way of working has a history: Relay started out as Yarded, developed with Logistics Battalion 163 and the Bundeswehr's Cyber Innovation Hub, proven in a field trial in Delmenhorst and awarded first place in the NATO Innovation Challenge in 2023. At MKS the team is building Relay from scratch, for every node of a deployment: seaport, railhead, airport and convoy support centre.