The Battle Lab Collaborative Simulation Environment (BLCSE) is a multi-site, multi-federate, entity-level, real-time simulation environment with the primary mission to enable Army concept development, technology evaluations, and doctrine research. As each lab has its own R&D capability and experimental objectives, simulation baselines, scenarios, and force structures are ever-changing. The physical architecture, simulation protocols, and models are also constantly evolving to accommodate higher entity counts, new combat models, and capabilities. The complexity of the overall system makes it difficult to detect problems as they occur. Protocol issues, configuration errors, and system or network overload conditions can cause cascading effects that are extremely difficult to isolate. Without early identification these conditions can lead to sluggish network performance and even complete simulation breakdowns.

The simulation dashboard is an array of web-based tools that enable real-time management and diagnosis of the simulation network; it helps federation control to maintain a fully operational distributed simulation environment. This combination of GOTS and COTS products ensures network integrity, configuration control, and real-time status of model performance. It shows the exercise director how the scenario is progressing through the use of scoreboards, showing attrition and logistics status among other key statistics. Its logging capability offers an automated restart that allows complete data recovery after catastrophic failures, and facilitates rapid exploration of other exercise branches and excursions.

This paper will describe the dashboard that has revolutionized the management and control of the simulation environment. Rather than spending days debugging and troubleshooting the network during integration or in the middle of an event, this toolset allows us to detect problems as the systems come on line and keep the community informed about the state of the environment every step of the way. The implementation of this capability has greatly reduced setup and integration time and has increased stability and reliability.