Scenario Model Interoperability Toolkit (SMIT)

KBSI proposes to design and develop a language, a suite of tools and a methodology to facilitate the syntactic and semantic interoperability of scenarios and simulation models among diverse vendor-specific tools and applications. This effort is motivated by the fact that no scenario definition language exists today that allows for easy inter-operability among simulators. And yet, the need to rapidly induct pieces of a scenario or interact with another simulator and share scenario data is ever increasing. Manual effort required to allow for semantic interoperability among scenarios is cost ineffective, tedious and error prone. We address these issues by developing the Extensible Scenario Management Language (ESML), an XML-based scenario definition and execution language that can support the comprehensive management of scenarios and their executions at different levels of abstraction. We will develop a component-based Scenario Model Interoperability Toolkit (SMIT) that supports translation of scenario definitions and models from one format to another using ESML as the interlingua. Model translation will itself be powered by an innovative ontology-driven translator code generator approach to ensure semantic interoperability. Finally, we will elaborately document the methodological changes required by instructors, students, tactical and strategic military analysts to develop, modify, and manage scenarios. BENEFITS: The proposed effort will be invaluable to instructors, students, and tactical and strategic military analysts. ESML and SMIT will primarily be designed with (a) syntactic and semantic interoperability of simulation models and (b) scenario lifecycle management in mind. ESML and SMIT will ensure not only huge savings in cost and time but will also ensure correctness. This ensures model reuse across a wide range of simulation applications as well at various levels of abstraction. ESML and SMIT can be applied to any future simulators used for distributed simulation exercises by organizations such as the Joint Operations Concepts (JOpsC) and Joint National Training Capability (JNTC) or the Navy Common Training Environment (NCTE) exercises. The developed technologies have huge commercial opportunity in any training environment that uses modeling and simulation to plan the training scenarios. This includes first responder training systems in emergency management, disaster recovery and homeland security, police, border patrol, drug interdiction, etc. There is a huge market potential in mission-critical nerve centers of defense and government facilities Finally, in mission critical space, air-traffic control and medical situations where scenario-based training systems are used for training, the developed technologies have a major role to play.