SEA research offers modelling and simulation tech advances
Cohort company SEA is conducting research for the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) on Information Management (IM) techniques that could have a significant impact on the way data is presented as a service for activities such as simulation and training, trials and evaluation and simulation-based acquisition.
SEA is the prime contractor for the Dstl Architectures, Interoperability and Management of Simulations (AIMS) research programme and has collaborated with sub-contractor Envitia, geospatial technologies and GIS software specialists, for a three-year study looking at developing an enabler for a Modelling and Simulation as a Service (MSaaS) ecosystem that can be used by a wide range of applications to satisfy various defence and other requirements.
The results of the research have been reflected in a paper by SEA Senior Consultant Louisa Stewart and Envitia Technical Consultant Brendan Mason, which will be presented at the I/ITSEC Conference in Orlando, Florida, tomorrow (30 November).
MSaaS can provide benefits to end users in a number of areas, including the delivery of scalable simulation resource on demand, a more flexible and adaptable capability, full transparency about assets available for re-use, and systems to enable end-users to explore potential simulation solutions, as well as specifying what they need. All of this feeds into cost and efficiency savings while also offering better overall solutions.
MSaaS is emerging as a strategically important approach to simulation delivery. “Our research has gone considerably further than a common data facility and focuses on IM as an enabler of MsaaS, making it fundamentally different to the way simulation has been delivered in the past,” Louisa adds. “The research has demonstrated the potential for meeting simulation coherence needs of UK defence, and identifies the importance of establishing an interoperable approach with coalition partners and the wider community”.
The research concluded that delivery of the MSaaS vision required a move to a new architecture, in which, individual simulation services and resources exist independently and are used to compose a wide range of simulation systems.
This type of architecture delivers an ecosystem which overcomes the challenge of how data is provided to the end user. Delivering MSaaS is based on a developed multi-layered information model. This model contains an information layer, defining the information and data that exist within the ecosystem, a metadata layer, and a registry layer, which defines a structure for a searchable registry in which data and metadata, and their associations, are catalogued and managed.