Most medium to large-scale training exercises today involve digital Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I) systems integrated with live, constructive, and virtual simulations. The U.S. Army has traditionally expended tremendous resources to ensure that the individual C4I systems within the Army Battle Command System (ABCS) start an exercise with an accurate, complete, and consistent set of initialization data. When digital C4I systems are integrated with either a simulation or federation of simulations, the complexity is significantly increased. Federations of simulations and their associated databases must be initialized and synchronized with the C4I systems that they interface with at the start of an exercise (StartEx). In addition to training applications, simulations and C4I systems are now being integrated for system testing, mission planning, course of action (COA) analysis, and mission rehearsal.

To meet these challenges, the Army's Program Executive Office, Command, Control, Communications, Tactical (PEO C3T) with members from the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) and the Army's Simultion-to-C4I Interoperability (SIMCI) Consortium, developed the Army C4I and Simulation Initialization System (ACSIS). The purpose of ACSIS is to establish an integrated database of authoritative data from which to build initialization data load products for both C4I systems and simulations based on a particular mission-specific Unit Task Organization (UTO).

Although, this paper will use ACSIS as a specific example of Army C4I and simulation StartEx integration, our intent is to provide the reader with experiences that are applicable to C4I and simulation integration for any Service or for Joint application.