Using XML To Support Military Decision-Making

The Department of Defense has focused much attention in recent years to the use of modeling and simulation for developing and analyzing the military systems of the future. Decreasing budgets, coupled with the necessity of being prepared for multi-faceted types of military activities, such as humanitarian interventions, joint peacekeeping efforts, and other “Missions-other-thanWar” have created a need to prepare for unforeseen missions. There is also a requirement for the military to attempt to try out unfielded and evolving weapon systems and technologies to see how they might affect their tactics, techniques, and procedures. This analysis is being done by means of modeling and simulation, from conventional (live action) war-gaming to completely virtual simulations. Constructive simulations are being used by the Army to determine the affect of new technologies on Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I). Capturing high-level, contextual information as well as sharing data objects can enhance simulation interoperability. The HLA (High-Level Architecture) consortium has established a standards infrastructure to make individual simulations interoperable. Specifically, the IEEE P1516.2 Standard for HLA OMT (Object Model Templates) prescribes a format to support the reuse of Simulation Object Models (SOMs). This standard has been ported to XML. XML has been used to represent computer-generated forces in military simulations tools, such as OneSAF (SemiAutonomous Forces). There is a major effort in the simulations community, called XMSF (Extensible Modeling and Simulations Framework), to propose a set of standards, processes, and practices to incorporate XML and web services. Our research effort has defined an XML-based specification grammar, SCML (Scenario Markup Language) based on an ontology of narrative. SCML can be used to support simulations, course-of-action analysis, battle planning, and other decision-oriented applications. This paper will examine these current efforts to incorporate XML and XML technologies into the military decision-making process.