Due to the changing training requirements of the B-2 Aircrew Training Device (ATD), the US Air Force has been upgrading their existing, legacy virtual simulator to be HLA compliant. These devices provide individual and crew training, but do not provide interoperability with other devices to satisfy full mission rehearsal requirements. Executing a strategic plan established in the late 1990 s to meet the Department of Defense (DoD) directive to become High Level Architecture (HLA) compliant, these devices are being upgraded to interoperate with other devices, both virtual and constructive. The devices will then be usable for team training in a Distributed Mission Training (DMT) environment to support full mission rehearsal.

The B-2 Weapon Systems Trainers (WST) and Mission Trainers (MT) were created to support the individual and crew training of B-2 pilots. They are large, high fidelity, multi-platform systems that simulate systems associated with the B-2 aircraft. These devices all provide a simulation of the synthetic environment (friendly, hostile, and neutral forces). The many versus many synthetic environment employed on the B-2 devices is Suppressor, a DoD, analytical, event-stepped, many-versus-many, threat model. Its traditional use has been in the analytical world to support Analysis of Alternatives (AOA), weapon effectiveness, and survivability analysis. It simulates human behavior, sensors (infrared, electro-optical, radar, and radar warning receivers), radios, jammers, weapon systems, and movement systems. The Suppressor model in place on the B-2 devices has been enhanced to run at a real time rate, interact with virtual devices, run under the simulator executive, handle Instructor requests to control/modify the environment and use no wait input/output (IO) mechanisms for file access during real time.

This paper will detail the stand-alone approach used to transform Suppressor into an HLA compliant federate. This carefully planned approach will allow the HLA compliant Suppressor model to be used in a similar manner on other virtual simulation devices to provide a many versus many synthetic environment for simulation based acquisition (SBA), wargaming analysis and full mission rehearsals. This paper also presents information detailing the modifications made to the existing B-2 devices to allow interoperability with the HLA compliant Suppressor model. All of the stand-alone capabilities were retained with this approach for an HLA federation. This federation can consist of one synthetic environment, Suppressor, and multiple HLA compliant B-2 devices.