Supporting Coalition Battle Management Language Experiments with Scripted Web Services

Abstract : Recent developments in Command and Control (C2) to Modeling and Simulation (M&S) interoperability have shown excellent potential to enable a range of coalition C2 and M&S systems to interoperate for training, mission rehearsal, and decision support. Achieving these capabilities is one of the major coalition challenges for the next few years. The NATO Modeling & Simulation Group has sponsored a Technical Activity, MSG-048, which is exploring recent advances in Command and Control-Simulation interoperability. The technology opportunity lies in Battle Management Language (BML), which supports effective communication among the C2 and simulation systems involved. The result promises to enable significant advances in simulation support for mission rehearsal, training, and mission planning for military operations. MSG-048 is in the fourth and final year of an experimentation program, intended to identify and validate the applicability of BML in support of coalition activities. This paper reports on a technical development, which has proved useful in enabling the rapid development of net-centric infrastructure for these experiments. The concept of scripted languages, recognized to be of high value in computing systems, enables an approach whereby the underlying functions of the BML Web Service are implemented in a scripting engine. This in turn facilitates a concise representation of the necessary mapping between BML and its supporting data model, resulting in an ability to implement changes in BML and the data model rapidly and accurately. The paper describes how the scripted services have been implemented and used to increase the effectiveness of the MSG-048 experimentation program. The result was that new capabilities and changes to existing services, requested by the experimentation group, could be made available rapidly and had fewer problems in implementation.