A community’s research agenda is a set of topics, objectives, and open questions that influence investment choices, usually in time and money, made by researchers, funders, policy-makers, and legislators. The modeling, simulation, and training (MS&T) community has invested significant resources, mostly through voluntary contributions of time, to identify science and technology challenges that slow the advance of the discipline. Past attempts to achieve a broad consensus within the community on the most important research questions have suffered from a conflation of MS&T and application area science objectives. This paper surveys prior contributions, describes a new approach to the research agenda, and reports on an NTSA-sponsored meeting of members from the academic MS&T research community, held in conjunction with the 2019 MODSIM World Conference, and charged to identify programs of research that will keep the community at the forefront of technological and methodological innovation. Fourteen organizations, spanning most of the universities that offer MS&T programs or degrees, participated in the MODSIM meeting, or provided substantive input directly to the organizer. The new approach, exercised there, involved finding those problems that the MS&T community cares about more than anyone else, prioritizing research topics that ‘we own’ as a discipline without regard to application area. Recommended initiatives were grouped into three distinct categories; research areas unique to the MS&T community, research topics in related disciplines that impact MS&T priorities, and research topics that would benefit from collaborative research with other communities. A key finding from the MODSIM workshop is that this approach will allow the community to focus awareness on core MS&T challenges, those that most clearly differentiate MS&T from other disciples that use models and simulations in course of their science, while collaborating with the broader community of science and reaping benefit from MS&T-relevant science and technology advances at-large.
Policy, Standards, Management, and Acquisition
Advancing the Research Agenda for the Modeling, Simulation, and Training Community
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