Modeling and Simulation (M&S) has become an extremely effective tool for supporting modern warfighting. This includes the use of M&S in systems acquisition and test and evaluation to improve the engineering performance of equipment and weapons systems, the use of M&S in training warfighters in essential decision-making and operational skills, and the use of M&S for analysis and experimentation to determine and evaluate future force capabilities. For each of these applications and others, cost-effective development and employment of M&S is crucial to U.S. warfighting success.

One way to achieve cost-effectiveness is to maximize use of existing M&S assets when those assets can meet requirements, rather than by initiating new developments that run the risk of failing to achieve such requirements. Maximizing use of existing assets, the essence of re-use, necessitates the development of mechanisms that enable systems acquisition personnel, systems development personnel, and operational users to discover and access the appropriate assets for their particular needs. Discovery of existing M&S assets is essential to reuse, but requires human and computer-understandable descriptions of their scope, features, and application to be effective. While thousands of entries exist in various M&S repositories and registries, maintaining their currency and completeness is a long-standing problem. To address the problem, the DoD Modeling & Simulation Coordination Office (M&S CO) is providing discovery services, tools, metadata specifications, and policy and guidance. This paper reviews these activities and how they can help generate, communicate, and make visible discovery metadata about M&S assets of interest to the DoD.

These activities center upon the M&S Catalog (https://mscatalog.osd.mil) that connects asset owners, repositories, and disparate end-users. Cloud-based tools such as the Enterprise Metacard Builder Resource (EMBR) Portal support collaborative creation of resource metacards. Standards such as the DoD M&S Community of Interest (COI) Discovery Metadata Specification (MSC-DMS) provide the template for documenting M&S assets. The newly revised DoD M&S Glossary (DoD 5000.59M) provides a clear M&S vocabulary and taxonomy for community understanding. Newly defined policy and guidance (such as DoDI 5000.59) help facilitate the sustainability of discovery and reuse of assets for the broader M&S community.

Version 1.4 of the MSC-DMS includes enhanced support of taxonomies, and allows a metacard to say exactly where individual terms come from (e.g., the M&S Glossary). Additionally, the MSC-DMS now supports records of points of contact as stand-alone entries. To assist potential contributors, the M&S CO has stood up the Discovery Data Working Group (DDWG) that provides a forum for mutual support and ongoing improvement of all aspects of discovery.

Together, these services, tools, standards, and policies and working groups promise to help further the discovery, reuse, and interoperability of M&S well into the 21st century.

Disclaimer: The views presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or its Components.