SBIR-STTR Award

The ever increasing complexity of distributed simulation environments has caused the level of effort required to manage and control a training exercise to become excessive. Exercise setup times and the number of human operators/instructors, needed to run an exercise, have reduced the number of useful training hours and increased the cost to train. To combat this situation, a more efficient means for controlling simulation exercises must be established. The number of simulation applications in use and the lack of consistent configuration and control methodologies require that any control mechanism be readily adaptable to new applications, while providing the instructor/coordinator a consistent interface with a minimal learning curve. Such a system must be able to accommodate industry standard protocols such as DIS, application specific protocols, and the anticipated next generation protocol. To develop this interface, a study must be made of existing applications and control mechanisms along with the methods currently employed by instructional personnel. The results must then be compared with the desired simulation functionality and human resources available to determine what actions can and should be taken to stream line the simulation control methodology and reduce the man loading required to conduct a simulation exercise

Keywords:
dis siman training simulation networking synthetic forces virtual environment software integr

The focus of this effort revolves around the desire to have all simulators representing a battlefield controllable and configurable from a centralized point. In order to accomplish this goal, DISTI will develop an exercise management facility by extending the capabilities of existing stand alone control systems and software as well as adding new ones. The extension of these systems will be done in a coordinated manner such that each individual system will be made to inter-operate forming a cohesive management environment controllable by one or two operators. Since the operator of such a system will be human, one of the key issues to determine will be what affect human factors bring to centralized exercise management. The user interfaces to such a system will need to focus on the job to be done as well as who is doing that job. The job to be done by this facility is scenario generation and initialization of the individual components such as threat systems or manned simulators. Additionally, data logging and playback will be features of this system to accommodate after action review and post-exercise analysis.

Keywords:
DIS HLA network management simulation management flight simulation instructor operations exercise