Simulations test army future combat systems.

• Author: Cast, Mike
• Position: Technology Report

As the U.S. Army proceeds with the development of the Future Combat Systems, program officials increasingly will be relying on sophisticated models and simulation to test the performance of the technology.

Much of this technology is being developed at the Army Test and Evaluation Command, and the Developmental Test Command. Engineers are attempting to model and test the performance of FCS as a network, or what the Army calls a "system of systems."

The FCS was conceived as a family of 18 combat vehicles, aircraft and weapon systems, all expected to operate and communicate with each other across the battlefield in a "seamless network."

The Army's challenge will be conducting tests that mirror this network-centric vision of combat operations.

The Developmental Test Command, or DTC, orchestrated a series of exercises to test FCS systems and providing the performance data Army evaluators need to ensure these systems are successful.

At the core of this effort is the Virtual Proving Ground, or VPG, an array of technologies and programs across DTC that allow testers to model and simulate military systems as they would operate on the battlefield.

DTC conducted a series of four complex test exercises as part of the Virtual Proving Ground "synthetic environment integration testbed" (SEIT). The demonstrations were designed as "distributed" testing, meaning simultaneous test operations at various test centers operating under a common operational battlefield scenario. This allows Army evaluators to acquire performance data on a system of systems such as FCS.

The latest of these demonstrations, the "Distributed Test Event 4" (DTE 4), conducted in late August 2004, involved DTC test centers and other Army organizations, as well as Boeing and Science Applications International Corporation, the two corporations that serve as the system integrators for FCS development. They jointly developed the DTE 4 tactical scenario.

The demonstration involved participants at locations ranging from the Pacific Northwest to the southeastern United States.

"A single operational scenario was published to all of the test centers, and each entity or environmental representation played a distinct role in the scenario," explained Tim Clardy, an engineer with DTC's Redstone Technical Test Center, in Alabama.

"The scenario ran for about 90 minutes and involved 140 interoperating computers spread out across the United States," he said. The exercise involved various combinations of...