U.S. Army Training and Testing activities can look conflicting when viewed by the uninitiated observer, but deeper analysis reveals that these requirements often converge towards commonality among the two communities. As a result, the Training and Operational Testing communities historically maintain separate hardware and software capabilities to meet their needs, which can lead to unnecessary redundancies and costs. To overcome this challenge, the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) and the U.S. Army Operational Test Command (USAOTC) have mapped commonality and differences across their Training and Testing requirements.
Based on this analysis, the U.S. Army material developers for Live Training and Operational Testing are collaboratively developing products utilizing a Product Line Management and Engineering approach. This collaboration allows developers within both environments to synchronize development efforts for the reuse of services, software, and hardware to enable the Operational Test environment. This reuse has resulted in significant cost avoidances for development and maintenance activities across products having significant overlap in requirements. In addition, the superset of requirements enhances both test and training capabilities, offering more realistic environments for both domains by collectively providing systems that address capabilities such as human factors and battlefield effects. Through the application of the Live Training Transformation (LT2) Product Line approach, the Integrated Live, Virtual, Constructive Test Environment (ILTE) program was able to deliver a hardened Version 1 capability to the USAOTC based on reuse of mature training services.
This paper provides a thorough analysis of the common requirements that enabled reuse of existing training solutions and standards, as well as where we found requirements that could be met by adapting training solutions to meet similar testing requirements. This analysis is presented through the lens of the Version 1 ILTE development and delivery activities to show real-world application of our approach.