The Military Scenario Definition Language (MSDL) was developed, in part, to provide a standard language for use throughout the military simulation community with the intent of permitting quick and easy integration and sharing of military scenarios on various simulators. Unfortunately, its promise of reducing technical integration workload across heterogeneous simulations has not been achieved. In response to the development workload demand of the Army Joint Forced Entry Warfighting Experiment (JFEWE), the Battle Lab Collaborative Simulation Environment (BLCSE) Engineering Support Team applied MSDL functionality by automating several of the labor intensive tasks in scenario generation and entity integration. This paper addresses the automated methodology and tools we developed for accurately and efficiently generating MSDL scenarios which can be used in simulation experimentation. This paper also addresses the additional automation of checking the submitted force structures for errors and for unmapped or non-existent units and entities, and then automatically mapping those units and/or entities to the appropriate files so that heterogeneous simulations are able to effectively communicate. The use of automation to generate the scenarios and integrate entities not only saves an incredible amount of time but drastically reduces human error. The automation processes presented in this paper were successfully applied to the JFEWE technical integration, thereby significantly reducing manpower and the time required to build, test, quality assure, and modify scenario files and integrate the federation. The application of these non-proprietary processes and freely available Government off the Shelf (GOTS) tools can significantly reduce the manpower requirements and schedule time required to integrate heterogeneous simulators into the warfighting experiments that Prepare our Forces to Secure our Future.
Automating MSDL Scenario Generation and Entity Integration For Simulation Events
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