Urban warfare continues to be critical in U.S. and allied military conflicts. As a result, government and industry have made great technological strides to support simulation and training in urban environments. However, the ability to simulate building damage with sufficient fidelity remains a significant capability gap.

On the battlefield, building damage events significantly impact tactics. For example, resulting rubble affects vehicle mobility, warfighters use explosives to form breach holes for building access, and building damage events incapacitate building occupants. Current training simulations, whether live, virtual or constructive, do not adequately model these effects.

Solutions from the analysis domain could be leveraged to address these shortcomings. These tools calculate building component damage, equipment damage, collapse, and rubbling effects. The DoD uses these models for weaponeering, but recent research has shown they can be adapted for real-time training.

However, challenges remain. Current training simulation tools do not support high-fidelity changes to their building formats. To support the aforementioned use cases, simulated buildings must be able to break apart, form breach holes, collapse, damage in specific areas, and rubble. Additionally, existing building formats lack the attribution required for high fidelity calculations (e.g., component material type, stud spacing, joint strength, etc.) Finally, distributed simulations are unable to communicate detailed building damage from node to node, resulting in uncorrelated buildings.

In this paper we discuss the state of the art of building damage in the training domain. We will discuss the entire problem space at a high level. We then propose solutions for two specific challenges. We propose the adaptation of specific analysis tools for the simulation domain. We outline our approach, as well as its challenges and limitations. We also present a methodology for communicating high fidelity building damage in a distributed simulation.

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Philip Sowden