Integrating legacy and evolving simulation systems complicates planning, creating, and executing training activities. Ensuring interoperability leads to technical problems requiring M&S experts to understand simulation protocols and bridge conceptual gaps between each system’s implementation of the simulated world. Even with expertise, designing an interoperable system requires time-consuming and error-prone processes and often results in simplified solutions that bound system capabilities to that of the least-capable component.
Focusing on integrating Marine Corps Air and Ground simulators at the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command (MAGTFTC) Battle Simulation Center (BSC), the FITE program has created FITEware, a tool suite improving the ability to execute simulation-based training activities using innovative tools and a flexible gateway architecture. Users focus on deciding which system capabilities and types of entities are needed while assistive aids determine the specific details of how each system will model those entities, identify protocol arrangements to link those systems together, and produce the complex configurations needed by simulation systems and gateways to provide fuller interoperable functionality. Further, these configurations can easily be adapted to subsequent similar training events, saving even more time and effort.
This paper details the methods by which this research has eliminated or reduced time-consuming and error-prone aspects of setup through automation and describes how the flexible gateway architecture maintains capabilities across integration. With FITEware in use, MAGTFTC BSC in collaboration with the 29 Palms Training Support Center (TSC) found that building a library of solutions to common simulation interoperability problems has improved their ability to execute historically difficult training activities. Furthermore, BSC and TSC found these tools offer more persistent, interoperability training solutions and opportunities to home station units and provides a pathway to achieve similar results for other simulation systems in large-scale, service-level training events.