Air Force Looking to Boost Connectivity for Simulators.

• Author: Roaten, Meredith
• Position: TRAINING & SIMULATION

ORLANDO, Fla.--The Air Force has thousands of simulators and training environments to prepare pilots for combat, but no way to access them all. The service is looking to remedy this by exploring new ways to enhance interoperability between its training platforms.

Training systems are often developed for specific program offices with specific capabilities. Because of this, "simulators are often proprietary products, and there's no way for those simulators to communicate," said Kevin McFarland, acquisition lead for modeling simulation and analysis at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center's Architecture and Integration Directorate.

The Common Simulation Training Environment, or the CSTE, is the answer to this problem, he said. By creating an environment where training systems can better link together, the Air Force will be able to more easily train large numbers of airmen at the level of fidelity that is required.

"When we're thinking about how we do this, we definitely don't want to do it like it's been done before," he said during the Training and Simulation Industry Symposium, which was hosted by the National Training and Simulation Association in June. NTSA is an affiliate of the National Defense Industrial Association.

The CSTE will be able to rapidly update similar to the way smartphone technology refreshes software on a continual basis through features such as operating system upgrades and new applications, McFarland said.

"The day I trade in my iPhone, it's more capable than the day I bought it ... because we've had software updates," he said. "How do we develop the ecosystem that we need to do this for training systems?" he asked.

But before the Air Force can tackle connectivity, it needs industry's help to figure out how to avoid potential challenges with fidelity and latency in the simulators. McFarland said he is looking for partners to help build the CSTE through a synthetic environment data architecture consortium that the Air Force wants to create. Requests for proposals for the consortium are expected to be released by the end of this fiscal year. A request for information was published in June. The Life Cycle Management Center's Architecture and Integration Directorate is looking for "potential business sources in transforming the data architecture and reducing infrastructure acquisition risks for a complex battlespace synthetic environment," according to the RFI.

It will be key to have the consortium in place as soon as...