The development and execution of mixed-architecture Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) environments poses many challenges (e.g., employing some combination of DIS, HLA, TENA, and CTIA). The LVC Architecture Roadmap (LVCAR) initiative was established to document these challenges. One key finding addressed the need to gain cross-community agreement on the format and content of object model data. Further, LVCAR recommended that agreements on object model content occur at the atomic-level and tools and techniques be developed to support the assembly of object models from object model components. The purpose of this paper is to report the progress of a pathfinder project to address this problem, called the Joint Composable Object Model (JCOM), which is developing an object model composability approach.

There are three aspects to the proposed solution: First, a technical framework to formalize the LVC environment conceptual model to relate to and support warfighter missions. The formalization of conceptual modeling provides a method to define LVC system functionality in a way to enable object model component composition via mission threads, organizing the conceptual model content while providing relevancy to warfighters. Second, the paper presents an architecture independent object model format as a method and technology to enable effective composability. This is critical to enable mixed-architecture LVC environments, permitting the reuse of existing assets. Third, since agreements on object model content and format are easier to achieve at a finer granularity, the approach relates object model fragments to the conceptual model via descriptive metadata. Metadata descriptions provide the method and semantic content required to relate the various object model components, and support object model assembly. An example mission thread, Joint Close Air Support (JCAS), showcases the methodology.