Abstract:

Modern military operations take place in a dynamic battlefield in which the landscape and infrastructure can change significantly due to weather effects or tactical destruction. Dynamic changes to the environment can affect the mobility of units, the tactical situation or, depending on their severity, invalidate operational plans altogether.

For decades, military simulation systems have featured some form of run-time dynamics, however, even today, the support for this is still limited in scale and scope and implemented in a system-specific manner.

This paper introduces compile-time dynamics, a concept that allows large-scale changes to the environment to be applied as part of the terrain generation process. The main advantage of this approach is that more sophisticated algorithms can be used to generate realistic and vastly altered environments compared to what would be possible at run-time. This allows simulation-based training scenarios to take place in environments that match actual battlefields instead of in static, sterile and pristine terrain databases. Furthermore, by integrating the dynamics in the terrain generation process, correlated terrain models can be exported for different simulation systems without requiring specific modifications for each simulator. The approach leverages procedural generation techniques, thereby avoiding the need for costly and cumbersome manually editing tasks.

We illustrate the potential of our approach with a range of natural effects such as seasonal changes and natural disasters such as flooding, combat engineering, and damage to infrastructure due to munition detonations. We show that these changes are not limited to visuals but also affect line of sight and CGF behavior, specifically path planning. Finally, we discuss how the approach could be extended from the training domain to mission preparation, where feedback from reconnaissance units in the field could be looped back in the compile-time dynamics pipeline, resulting in an updated virtual representation of the mission area.

Keywords: GEOSPATIAL DATA ;SIMULATIONS

Ewan Demeur

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Transforming Terrain Databases into Battlefield Environments Using Compile-Time Dynamics