A Boost for Mission Rehearsal
Written by Peter A. Buxbaum
to changes in requirements for simulator databases.
The increased emphasis on mission rehearsal has led to changes in requirements for simulator databases and has presented challenges to the companies that compile those databases. For one thing, the military wants the mission rehearsal databases to be updated with the latest intelligence on the upcoming mission target. This requires the ability to update the database at a velocity not required of ordinary training databases.
Further, mission rehearsal simulation is often conducted in conjunction with multiple warfighters training for the same operation on different platform simulators. Simultaneous use of multiple simulators to accomplish a single mission rehearsal requires that the data supplying the imagery for each simulator be aligned. This has led to development of common databases and data sets that assure the fidelity of data for different applications and contribute to the success of the rehearsal. The move toward common data also means a move away from proprietary databases and data formats and toward data that can be reused for subsequent applications.
MISSION REHEARSAL DATABASE REQUIREMENTS
“The most common use of simulators is still for training,” said Dave Graham, director of SOF programs at CAE USA. “Training applications have requirements for the stability of the screen view and the quality imagery and the lack of distractions from the task being trained on. When simulators are being used for mission rehearsal, typically there is no instruction. There is simply a crew doing the rehearsing and commanders reviewing the mission.”
“One of the primary requirements for mission rehearsal databases is for rapid update,” said John Woytus, the lead engineer in charge of database production for Boeing Training Systems and Services. “In many cases, the majority of a training database or mission rehearsal database could be identical, but there is a need to update the mission database with specific data rather quickly.”
That means “in hours or a day or two, not weeks or months,” added Nick Giannias, vice president for research and technology at Presagis, a Montreal-based provider of modeling and simulation software. “The requirement for training databases is primarily about quality and fidelity.”
The sources of the updated data for mission rehearsal databases could be satellite imagery, data from an unmanned aerial vehicle or photographic data. Developers of mission rehearsal databases must incorporate this data into the database on demand, a process that could sacrifice a measure of image fidelity.
On the other hand, developers of databases for training simulators pride themselves on the automated tools they have developed to provide custom-crafted quality images to simulation databases. For example, Triangraphics GmbH, a company based in Berlin, Germany, offers generic databases that are incorporated into training simulators. These generic databases seek to capture the details of the features that developers want to incorporate in their databases, such as islands, airports or urban terrain. The company also custom designs scenarios for specific applications.
Triangraphics specializes in the realistic portrayal of road networks. “We have a software tool that models very complex road crossings,” said Stephan Kussmaul, the company’s managing director. Around the roads, the databases display features, such as street signs, houses and mailboxes, or whatever the particular training scenario requires. These features are generated from photographs or designed by hand in the Triangraphics studio. Triangraphics has also designed modules that have been incorporated in databases used in the training of tank drivers, which include on-road and off-road options.
The U.S. military services and Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) have each taken steps to streamline the process of generating training and mission rehearsal databases in order to make the databases, and the simulation activities that they support, more efficient and efficacious. “The Navy was first out of the gate with the approach of developing a common data set,” said Woytus. The Air Force followed with a similar approach.
“This allows the next supplier of a database for a different system for the Navy or Air Force to use the same source data, saving a huge amount of work in developing that data,” Woytus added. “Once you have common data, you can use different image generators. You can also get a correlated database that is applicable from one platform to another.”
COMMON DATABASE
USSOCOM was the driving force behind the command database (CDB) to address the needs of mission rehearsal and for the rapid update of databases. CAE designed and developed the CDB for USSOCOM.
“With the CDB we decided to create a data container that had everything in it to support the simulator,” Graham explained. “In the approach taken for the common database, simulator builders don’t have the luxury of deciding how to store data. CDB does not provide a data standard but a specification on how to use data in a common industry format in a way to support run-time publishing.” The next version of the CDB specification is scheduled to be released in the fall of this year.
By taking this approach, the CDB can be used as a run-time data repository from which the various simulation clients being used simultaneously for a mission rehearsal retrieve information concurrently to perform their simulation tasks. The CDB approach also allows the rapid modification and correlation of run-time databases using the latest intelligence and source data available.
The CDB largely eliminates the time-consuming offline database compilation process for each simulation client. Current compilation steps lead to the replication of data and to a loss of correlation across the simulator network. The CDB provides a single repository consisting of a static synthetic representation ranging from small areas of interest to the entire world. It includes all the relevant information for clients—the separate platform simulators—to perform their respective simulation tasks and avoids any data content duplication. All of this contributes to reduced costs for database development, deployment and maintenance.
“Everyone using the same data representation is very important in mission rehearsal,” said Graham. “If a mountain appears in one simulator, it had better appear in the others being used for a mission rehearsal and in the same way.”
CAE was responsible for implementing the CDB on two combat mission simulators for the U.S. Special Operations Forces 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne). The first simulator to use the CDB was an MH-47G Chinook simulator, which became operational in the summer of 2007. The next was an MH-60L Black Hawk simulator, which CAE delivered to the unit in the summer of 2008.
Presagis, which makes tools that generate content for a variety of simulation and visualization products, has seen the value of the CDB approach in the development of its own products, according to Giannias. “We have a vision for how our products will work together through CDB to move data back and forth very quickly and to resolve the problems associated with the translations of data formats as data is moved from one database to another,” he said.
The next version of Presagis’ Terra Vista terrain content generator will incorporate the CDB data specification. More than that, Giannias foresees CDB emerging as a potential global specification for the storage of simulator data. “The military in the United Kingdom is looking at CDB, not for mission rehearsal data, but as a standard for storing all existing simulation data in a source repository which can be shared with contractors,” he said.
The German government as well, he added, is looking at the CDB specification for the creation of a common synthetic environment. “It’s about speed,” Giannias said, “but it’s also about interoperability. The way things stand now, data is cataloged in different formats, and there are no conventions for file names. Everyone uses satellite imagery, but everyone calls it by a different name. Standardizing at these levels of detail in many ways represents the value that can be derived from CDB.”
CDB will also help in the generation of simulators that can portray complex terrains such as urban environments, according to Giannias. “In CDB you can get an agreement on how buildings are referenced and how interiors of buildings are described,” he said. “You want to make sure that the specification describes these environments in all their richness. Today this is not really possible without manual effort. CDB will be able to create standards so that this can be done in a vendor agnostic.”
CDB is but one way to approach the problems of data alignment and update in simulator databases. “People are attacking these issues through other means as well,” said Graham.
The U.S. Army is seeking to retrofit its many legacy simulator databases with common data. “The cost to replace these systems would be pretty high,” said Graham. “There are modeling tools that can achieve a lot of this in an automated fashion.”
The result is the Army’s Synthetic Environment Core (SE Core), a program with the objective of ensuring that the Army’s simulation systems are integrated, interoperable and compatible with live training systems. “SE Core represents a good part of the effort to clean up source data gathered under different atmospheric conditions and displaying different artifacts and turning them into usable simulator data,” said Graham. “The result is a set of refined source data that is saved in a format for reuse so that the next guy doesn’t have to go through the same process of cleaning up the data.”
SE Core is led by the Army’s PEO STRI and is divided into two initiatives. The architecture and integration effort is led by SAIC with the mission of providing the architecture analysis and development of a virtual simulation architecture. The architecture provides a common virtual environment for linking virtual simulations into a fully integrated and interoperable training capability.
The second initiative under SE Core is the database virtual environment development (DVED) effort led by CAE. The purpose of the SE Core DVED is to rapidly generate correlated simulation system run-time terrain databases for a range of supported simulation systems, such as the Army’s combined arms tactical trainer and the aviation combined arms tactical trainer systems.
Using the SE Core DVED defined database production process together with a suite of commercial and government off-the- shelf database development software tools, a master SE Core database is populated using a variety of data sources. The database production process and software tools enable the generation of master SE Core databases in days or hours instead of the typical database production time of several months. The entire SE Core DVED database generation process aims to create non-proprietary, open format, image generator independent terrain databases that can be used by any simulation system within a short period of time.
CAE has established the Army’s first database production center in Orlando and is currently going through final government acceptance testing. “The entire SE Core DVED effort is a major transformation to the Army’s capability of generating, maintaining, using and reusing databases,” said Graham.
The kinds of comprehensive efforts represented by the CDB and the SE Core do not represent the end of the road in simulator database development. As things stand now, these tools represent portable, reusable data sets that can be used to animate a variety of simulators. They are not unitary enterprise databases that simulators can plug into on a global basis.
But the day when that type of service is available is likely on its way, according to Graham. “At some point in the future,” he said, “it is reasonable to assume that the government will have the connectivity in place so that the common database will exist in one place somewhere in a cloud and that when a system needs to connect with it, it will simply connect.
“That involves a discussion of connectivity and bandwidth,” he added. “It would actually be easy to do if you had enough bandwidth at your command.” ♦
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