A Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Simulation Roadmap (2007 - 2017) is being developed to identify specific opportunities for simulation and readiness management. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has defined a vision that "Defence exploits simulation to develop, train for, prepare for, and test military options for Government wherever it can enhance capability, save resources, or reduce risk".

The ultimate objective of this RAAF Simulation Roadmap is to produce and support a Distributed Simulation, Training and Experimentation, Synthetic Range Environment that implements this ADF vision. The RAAF Simulation Roadmap describes the main concepts and technologies to be used in such a RAAF synthetic range system and recommends a program of research over the period 2007 to 2017 to develop such a system.

This paper presents an overview of some of the research carried out so far, upon which the RAAF Simulation Roadmap is based, including:

• The concept of the synthetic range, whereby ADF real-world, operational military platforms, training and experimentation simulators and/or simulation systems can seamlessly interoperate with each other, that is currently being developed;

• Which distributed simulation (eg DIS, HLA or TENA), radio/intercom communications and tactical data link protocols, technologies, gateways and standards need to be adopted and why. Interoperability between RAAF systems, other ADF service and coalition partner systems has also been taken into consideration;

• The real-world, operational platform and simulation architectures that enable such synthetic range systems to seamlessly interoperate with each other; and

• Some of the innovations and lessons learned so far in the development of this interoperable, RAAF/ADF, training and experimentation synthetic range environment.

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Jon Blacklock