Development of a C2SIM interface prototype in OneSAF

摘要

The US Army Redstone Test Center (RTC) is a participant in the NATO Modeling and Simulation Group (NMSG) 145 which is evaluating C2SIM as a standard. RTC developed a prototype interface in One Semi-Automated Force (OneSAF) to comply with the C2SIM draft specification. The C2SIM interface can publish position reports and handle incoming orders translating them to the corresponding OneSAF behaviors. A component was also created to process a currently loaded OneSAF scenario and create a corresponding C2SIM initialization message. OneSAF unit/entity initialization through MSDL was not implemented due to time constraints and the currently limited number of fields supported by the draft C2SIM standard. During the creation of the protype several potential improvements to the current draft standard were noted. One example is the C2SIM messages use a rigid XML structure which is difficult to tailor to each simulation software. During the prototype construction we had to use certain fields in ways they were not originally intended. Throughout testing the heavy reliance on the BMLC2GUI, a mission command surrogate, was noted. There are concerns that the C2SIM specification is being tailored to this surrogate GUI instead of actual C2 devices as originally intended. One proposed solution would be to send these position reports over an existing C2 message format such as VMF. This paper will detail the issues found during the development of the prototype interface to OneSAF and the workarounds implemented. The paper will also provide recommendations to future versions of the C2SIM standard.