Previously Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Air Defence Controllers relied on interaction with live F/A-18s to receive most of their realistic, high fidelity training. Access to such live asset training is limited in that it is prohibitively expensive and such assets have very short lifetimes before a major overhaul is required. An Advanced Distributed Simulation, virtual environment, training system known as the Air Defence Ground Environment Simulator (ADGESIM) has been developed and delivered.

A generic, Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA) like, composability, toolbox approach, using a mixture of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) and customized "thin client" Government-Off-The-Shelf (GOTS) components, has been used to construct ADGESIM. The Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocol is used to communicate between ADGESIM components however the simulator architecture is such that the Higher Level Architecture (HLA) or TENA "protocols" could also be easily used in the future if required.

All ADGESIM components are developed to run on desktop/portable PCs under the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and are therefore low cost and cost effective to develop and maintain and can be easily deployed. ADGESIM was rapidly developed and fielded from a concept demonstrator to operational use bypassing the normal, system acquisition process. ADGESIM stimulates the real, same systems used by the Air Defence Controllers thus eliminating most traditional, trainer concurrency problems.

This paper describes and discusses some of the innovations, technologies, toolbox components, simulator architecture, development processes and philosophies used and the lessons learned developing ADGESIM.