Modeling and Simulation Technologies Development for Combat System Integration and Certification

The Navy"s systems today are largely software based and growing in complexity. However, despite the advances in development practices and tools, the goals of accelerating the rate at which systems can be delivered and reducing their costs cannot be met by simply writing software faster without comparable improvement in the practices and tools for modeling, simulation, and testing the software. Current simulation capabilities to support combat system integration and testing often are very limited especially for control and weapon"s system interfaces. As a result, tests are constrained to simple verification that if a message is properly populated and sent at an expected message rate in an expected sequence, the system under test responds as expected. The simulation capabilities often are also hard to keep up to date and as a result fall behind changes made to the tactical system. The ability to provide a robust simulation capability will provide key technology that is necessary to support the Navy"s desire to deliver capability to the Fleet at a faster pace within a fiscally challenged environment.