Combat Management System Integration into the Virtual Maritime System: A Case Study

This paper reports on the ongoing collaborative activity between Saab Systems and the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) in support of Australian research in naval combat systems. The particular case considered is that involving the integration of the ANZAC Ship Combat Management System (CMS) within the DSTO High Level Architecture (HLA) based Virtual Maritime System (VMS). The paper begins by examining the issues associated with insertion of a complex real-time system into a distributed simulation environment. Of the many issues addressed, the principal challenge has been to satisfy the hard real-time requirements of the CMS within the non-real time operation of the simulation environment without compromising the validity and fidelity of the CMS or the simulation. This has required technical exploitation of the HLA, evolution of the VMS Architecture and clever means of circumventing dedicated hardware interfaces without requiring change to the underlying CMS code whilst maintaining a generic but rich description of the data that is exchanged. Integration of the ANZAC Ship CMS enables a virtual ANZAC Ship to be represented that may then be used as a basis for experimentation and exploration of future concepts. This paper will proceed to discuss the process by which the Virtual ANZAC federation instance of the VMS enables exploration of areas such as the integration of new sensors and effectors, optimised allocation of combat system resources and the implementation of new operational and tactical level concepts (including Human-in-theloop mission simulation). Specific examples of capability development programmes are also provided. Finally, a useful application benefiting from this work has been the development of a low cost training environment for the Royal Australian Navy based at HMAS Watson.