Application of HLA to Distributed Virtual Ship Combat Information Center Training

Abstract

The High Level Architecture (HLA) and its software implementation Runtime Infrastructure (RTI) are developed by Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) to provide a common framework for disparate simulations to communicate with one another. This paper presents lessons learned from making one of the U.S. Navy distributed simulations comply with HLA. Virtual ship combat information center, or Virtual CIC, is a virtual reality application developed as a cost-effective means of training crew members at Navy surface combatant training facilities. Real combat system consoles are used for crew training in these facilities. Due to the high cost of acquiring, reconfiguring and maintaining these consoles, there is a limited number of consoles available to the students. With the advent of cheaper and more powerful graphics computers, virtual reality is an economical and viable training alternative. An added benefit of the Virtual CIC is the ability to conduct training in a distributed environment where students and the instructor can be at different geographical locations but interact with each other in the same virtual ship or CIC. Virtual CIC was developed to use User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to communicate between each participant. In order to comply with the Department of Defense (DoD) mandate, Virtual CIC was upgraded to use RTI. RTI Version 1.3R6 provided by DMSO was used in the upgrade of Virtual CIC. RTI ownership management services are utilized to manage access to common resources in order to maintain a consistent tactical picture among crewmembers in a distributed training session. A number of observations were made during the implementation and testing of the system. This paper presents those observations in some detail.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA520055

Entities

People

  • Henry Ng
  • Patrick Melody
  • Suleyman Guleyupoglu

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Application Software
  • Combat Information Centers
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Department Of Defense
  • Environment
  • Graphics
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Infrastructure
  • Lessons Learned
  • Network Architecture
  • Simulations
  • Students
  • Training
  • Virtual Reality

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Military Training and Readiness Simulation
  • Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.