Adding reports to coalition battle management language for NATO MSG-048

The NATO Modeling and Simulation Group Technical Activity 48 (MSG-048) was chartered in 2006 to investigate the potential of a Coalition Battle Management Language for multinational and NATO interoperation of command and control systems with modeling and simulation. Its initial work in defining and demonstrating a basic capability for this purpose has been reported in previous Euro-SIW papers. This paper addresses Phase 2 of the Technical Activity which expanded the BML paradigm by adding C2 Reports, enabling two-way flow of information between C2 and simulation systems. The new capability was demonstrated at the InterService/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2008. The demonstration configuration combined three national C2 systems and three national simulations along with middleware from two other nations. The result was a generic C2-simulation linkage with no humans in the information exchange loop. This was achieved in only four months, using a network-enabled development approach with an Internet Reference Implementation combined with a powerful development environment based on a C2 Lexical Grammar graphical user interface for inspection of the exchanged information, plus a scripted approach for rapid development of expanded BML Web services. This paper provides a description of the BML Reports and the enhanced development methodology to support expansion of the BML concept in general and the work of the SISO C-BML Product Development Group in particular. We conclude with a projection of the work of MSG-048 in 2009, which focuses on operational validation of the C-BML concept.