Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are a key component of the overarching systems-of-systems needed to engage an asymmetric, agile threat in both current and future military engagements. A UAS can itself be considered to be a system-of-systems, integrating advanced airframe, sensor, weapon, and communication technologies into a critical capability in modern operational strategies. To effectively procure such a complex system, advanced modeling and simulation (M&S) capabilities have become an inherent aspect of contemporary systems engineering practices. Live, virtual, and constructive (LVC) M&S resources are routinely applied across all acquisition program phases to reduce technical risk and lower lifecycle costs.
This paper reports on an M&S initiative to develop a persistent LVC simulation environment to support UAS Airspace Integration (AI) analysis, testing, and training1. The Live, Virtual, Constructive Distributed Environment (LVC-DE) concept involves using a mature, reliable DoD networking infrastructure (Joint Mission Environment Test Capability) to link multiple government M&S facilities into a single unified environment for representing the external flight environment that a UAS must operate within. Such representations include actual commercial flight traffic patterns, a wide variety of target entities, and supporting military aircraft. By reusing this government-managed environment, UAS system developers can focus on the representation of their own systems as they evolve, and interface with the LVC-DE to investigate pertinent safety issues and associated system design issues associated with integration of their systems into the National Airspace System (NAS).
In FY09, the Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) Program served as the LVC-DE pathfinder, providing the funding resources and analytic requirements needed to drive the baseline development. A series of design meetings and integration events were conducted throughout the year, culminating in a successful "Runs for Record" (RFR) in December 2009. This paper will describe these efforts, and also define ongoing LVC-DE development/employment efforts in FY10.