A Proposed Process and Toolset for Developing Standardized C 2-to-Simulation Interoperability Solutions

The Military Scenario Definition Language (MSDL) and the Coalition Battle Management Language (C-BML) are open standards that have been developed for military scenario initialization and run-time exchange of digitized military information among command and control (C2), simulation and autonomous systems by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO). Initial versions of MSDL and C-BML have been released by SISO and recent activity has begun toward merging MSDL and C-BML into a unified C2-toSimulation (C2SIM) standard. The NATO Modeling and Simulation Group 085 (MSG-085) Technical Activity was kicked off in 2010 and has worked in the area of Standardization for C2SIM Interoperation for the past four years. More recently, a subgroup of MSG-085 has developed an engineering process and prototype toolset for the development and maintenance of a unified C2SIM Scenario INitialization and EXecution (SINEX) Model. SINEX is an engineering process and toolset that uses a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach and builds upon existing tools and models from the Multilateral Interoperability Programme (MIP). As part of this activity, the group also developed a draft C2SIM Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process (DSEEP) Overlay for the development of federations comprised of simulation and C2 systems. The current paper reports on these activities and provides recommendations for the adoption of the SINEX Process for the development of the unified C2SIM interoperability standard currently being proposed by SISO. The SINEX process and toolset allow for the management of requirements as per system engineering best practices while ensuring traceability to the model elements that are defined as part of the process. Automated tools produce UML models, diagrams and documentation based on a set of model definition files. It also is possible to automatically produce model representations such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schemas using available model transformations. This process and toolset could be employed to facilitate the alignment and convergence of the MSDL and C-BML toward the goal of a unified C2SIM model. This model then can be utilized as one of the inputs into the C2SIM Federation development process as specified in the C2SIM DSEEP overlay. Proposed Process and Toolset for Standardized C2SIM Interoperability Solutions 2 2 STO-MP-MSG-126 1.0 INTRODUCTION The NATO MSG-085 Technical Activity formed a series of Common Interest Groups (CIG) in early 2012 to address domain-specific issues for the Air, Land and Maritime domains. The Requirements, Recommendations and Specifications (2RS) CIG was formed to explore the viability of the SINEX approach with the objectives of documenting a formal process and creating a prototype production chain based primarily on existing COTS tools and those made available by the Multilateral Interoperability Programme (MIP) Block 4 Working Group. An additional objective of this CIG was to create a draft version of a DSEEP Overlay to guide the use of the derived products for C2-to-Simulation (C2SIM) Federation development. Following this introduction, Section 2 describes the SINEX approach and the results of the 2RS CIG. Section 3 describes the C2SIM DSEEP Overlay drafted by the 2RS CIG. Section 4 proposes a set of recommendations for future work, as well as recommendations for the standardization bodies. Section 5 concludes the paper.