Ccrts " Collective C2 in Multinational Civil-military Operations " Title of Paper: Supporting Nato C2-simulation Experimentation with Scripted Web Services

The NATO Modeling and Simulation Group Technical Activity 48 (MSG-048) operated from 2006 to 2009, investigating the potential of a Command and Control (C2) Battle Management Language (BML) for Multinational and NATO C2-simulation interoperation. To achieve this, MSG-048 used an interface specification developed under US Army support called Integrated BML, enhanced to meet coalition needs. Demonstrations in 2007 and 2008 culminated in a weeklong period of experimentation in 2009. In all, six national C2 systems and five national simulations successfully interoperated, showing a high likelihood that the approach used can form the basis of a wide range of coalition collaboration. BML Web services used by MSG-048 were developed by our group under an innovative approach called Scripted BML, in which BML is mapped to JC3IEDM and stored in a database. The range of needed functions is supported by a scripting engine that considerably simplifies requirements for development of the BML Web service. This, in turn, allows rapid response to XML schema changes in the experimental environment while at the same time reducing possible coding errors to the minimal set represented in the scripting language. The Scripted BML server implements push, pull, and publish/subscribe capabilities and has been provided with multithreading capability for better performance and an improved Condensed Scripting Language to reduce effort required for scripting. This paper provides a description of the functions and design of the Scripted BML Server along with examples of its use by MSG-048.