Last month we posted some key technology trends that Nick Giannias, Presagis Vice President of Research & Technology, has been tracking. In this Q&A Mr. Giannis continues discussing important modeling and simulation industry issues.
Mainstream software usability has progressed tremendously over the past years. For software developers in M&S, there are significant lessons to be learned from mainstream software, particularly with respect to its sheer number of users.
While there is a large market for M&S software, it does not currently benefit from the usability pool that other software has. The goal for M&S software developers is to improve the usability level of our software to be on par or better than the mainstream software to which we are all accustomed.
M&S applications are being used to make accurate and reliable evacuation plans, to test non-lethal weapons and crowd dispersal mechanisms, to simulate UAV aerial tracking, and to train for urban operations. Immersive fidelity is crucial for the quality of training that will save lives in the “real world.”
Sophisticated AI delivers advanced decision making, intelligent path finding, and animation control to your simulation. And, because it can mimic behaviors and can offer crowd modeling and civilian modeling, AI also provides the human factor that is so essential for effective emergency response training.
Serious Games technology is at the forefront of AI development. By combining high-fidelity visuals with advanced immersive realism, Serious Games technology is critical for developing 21st century applications.
Since it is impossible for a single simulation to meet all the requirements of a given application, the solution is to offer interoperability between multiple simulations, each with its own area of specialization and linked together to meet the overall objective.
In order to make it possible for the components in a simulation system to work together, several standards have been developed to govern interoperability, including DIS, HLA, and CIGI. Products must be developed to support the latest open-networking and communications standards.
Interoperability between simulation tools and applications is also vital, particularly as project requirements grow both in scale and complexity. Consequently, tools must be able to work together to produce accurate results.
To put it simply, better correlation in a synthetic environment is key to ensuring the most accurate results. The perception of the environment is a major factor in the response of any simulation as doubt about the validity of results will arise if different elements of the simulation perceive the environment differently. Consider the example of a single set of raw GIS data being used to produce multiple terrain representations as required by different simulations. Without a common set of tools for processing the data and algorithms for using the data, it is not possible to guarantee that the terrain will be exactly the same in each simulation.
Today’s applications are being built to meet our current needs. Increasingly, they are built on industry standards using COTS software, which reduces the time required for tool customization.
Software developers must first consider how tomorrow’s applications are going to re-use today’s development. To facilitate reusability in the future, M&S software developers can employ multiple levels of abstraction in the architecture of their systems as well as defined interfaces between models. This will ensure that, as simulation requirements change over time, the core logic, modeling, and simulation capabilities will remain constant. Application developers will then be free to re-use fundamental components in any number of new contexts.
Presagis is atthe forefront of M&S innovation. As such, we encourage you to look at these other valuable resources on presagis.com to help you better understand the future of modeling & simulation:
