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SMIT Architecture

For this initiative, an SBIR contract funded by NAVAIR, KBSI designed and developed a language, suite of tools, and methodology to facilitate the syntactic and semantic interoperability of scenarios and simulation models among diverse vendor-specific tools and applications.  This effort was motivated by the fact that no scenario definition language existed that allows for easy inter-operability among simulators.  In addition, the need to rapidly induct pieces of a scenario or interact with another simulator and share scenario data is ever increasing.  The manual effort required to allow for semantic interoperability among scenarios was cost ineffective, tedious, and error prone.

As part of this initiative, KBSI developed 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.  Following the ESML development, KBSI next developed a component-based Scenario Model Interoperability Toolkit (SMIT) that supports the translation of scenario definitions and models from one format to another using ESML as the interlingua.  Model translations are powered by an innovative ontology-driven translator code generator approach that ensures semantic interoperability. In addition, the methodological changes required by instructors, students, and tactical and strategic military analysts to develop, modify, and manage scenarios were elaborately documented as part of the SMIT initiative.

The results of the SMIT effort are invaluable to instructors, students, and tactical and strategic military analysts.  ESML and SMIT were primarily designed with (a) syntactic and semantic interoperability of simulation models and (b) scenario lifecycle management in mind.  ESML and SMIT ensure not only huge savings in cost and time but also ensure correctness.  This guarantees 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 also have commercial potential in any training environment that uses modeling and simulation to plan training scenarios.  This includes first responder training systems in emergency management, disaster recovery, and homeland security; police; border patrol; drug interdiction, etc.  In addition, there is also large market potential in the mission-critical nerve centers of defense and government facilities, and in mission critical space, air-traffic control, and medical situations in which scenario-based systems are used for training.