Silos in Defence Simulations (Synthetic Training Environments)
Synthetic training environments (STE) have been used for many years in the defence industry. During this time the software supporting the environments has evolved in different ways making them more divergent than convergent. This has led to data silos both across and within military domains.
Breaking down data silos within the defence industry is a major challenge. The work on previous simulations and the hardware they support can not be simply tossed aside as it represents many $100Ms of investment.
The history of STEs in the defence industry causes further problems when considering future proofing the current investment in hardware and software. As the demand for more holistic STEs grows to save the cost and increase safety of real world multidisciplinary exercises, there is more need for the legacy hardware and software to communicate and manage larger defence simulations.
Overcoming Silos with Hadean Simulate
A common problem faced by STEs in the defence industry is the different protocols used by different simulations. If the protocols are incompatible the two simulations cannot communicate with each other leading to data silos.
Hadean Simulate allows protocols to communicate to each other via a bridge. Simulations utilising HLA and DIS protocols connect to the bridge where Hadean Simulate (formerly known as Aether Engine) takes ownership of the entities. Hadean manages all the entities in a single simulation giving it the ability to broadcast any data in the simulation using any protocol to any endpoint via the bridge.
Using Hadean Simulate’s bridge support you can network together simulations from around the world using multiple different protocols to create large scale cross domain STEs. But it doesn’t stop there…
Managing large scale cross domain STEs
When large amounts of defence simulations come together performance of the entire system becomes a concern. If the bridge or any of the simulations fall out of sync it can impact the integrity of the entire STE. Hadean Simulate is a cloud first distributed simulation engine, making it ideal to handle the ever increasing demands of more and more simulation compute.
Hadean Simulate is built on top of the Hadean Platform which uses its unique scaling process model to supply processes to Hadean Simulate as needed. It uses its octree technology to divide spatial simulations into separate cells giving processing power to each cell based on the amount required by the simulation. This means that no matter how much processing power is needed to supply a simulation Hadean Simulate will be able to supply it.
The increased processing power of Hadean Simulate allows you to take advantage of other performance gains. For example, you can offload key functionality from existing simulations such as AI or advanced physics interactions which will free up endpoint simulations to visualise and interact with a much more realistic simulated environment. You will be able to run simulations over fully populated city sized urban areas to give training to your personnel you have never done before.