Swedish Defence Research on the NetBeans Platform (Part 2)

In part 1, Robert Forsgren, Senior Research Assistant at the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) introduced NetScene, the scenario editor created by FOI to consolidate work in the simulation domain. Part 1 focused on simulation, while below, i.e., in part 2, Robert describes some of the other activities performed with NetScene.

Simulation and Concept Development & Experimentation

While simulation is where NetScene is most used, it can also be used for concept development & experimentation (CD&E) activities. The running scenario can be modified during run-time, enabling users to stimulate exercises:

Figure 1: Modifying flight routes during simulation 

NetScene Plug-ins

While NetScene was designed to be able to set up and control distributed simulations, it is not limited to that purpose. The plug-in concept of the NetBeans Platform is used to handle connections to other systems, where the HLA plug-in is only one connection.

HLA plug-ins

There are two plug-ins that enables NetScene to setup and control HLA simulations.

• The first is the Federation Manager. This plug-in creates and control HLA federations enabling play, pause and stop functionality in the distributed simulation. The Federation manager can regulate the time synchronization in the federation, enabling non-real-time simulations to be synchronized.


• The other is the HLA Connector. This plug-in synchronize NetScenes scenario with the HLA federation. Entities in NetScene can be set to be considered remote. Those entities will be remote created via the HLA Connector in matching participating federate. The user can modify the synchronization mapping to custom federation and add special synchronization classes to facilitate non one-to-one mapping between HLA object attribute and NetScene entity attribute.

NFFI plug-in

NATO Friendly Force Information (NFFI) is a simple XML format used by several commercial C2 applications.

The NFFI plug-in enables NetScene to communicate with these C2 applications to be able to act as a game tool for C2 exercises.

Multi Sensor System Use of the NetBeans Platform

The focus for the Multi Sensor Systems (MSS) group is to simulate as realistically as possible from sensor model to tracking system. These simulations typically do not run in real-time. The federates are primarily Java and Matlab federates.

Figure 2: Simplified MSS federation, all arrows are interactions via HLA

In the distributed simulation described in Figure 2 above, NetScene creates the ground truth for the simulation and configuration for the participating federates. Sensors are remote created in federates and are controlled by either NetScene or the Sensor control federate.

The Radar sensor model in Figure 2 uses the entities in the federation to create radar data which are sent out on HLA. These data are then used by the Radar detector to analyze the data and produce detections which are sent out on HLA.

Figure 3: Visual representation of radar data

The Lidar and IR sensor models perform similar actions in the electro-optic domain.

Figure 4: Visualized lidar data

Figure 5: Infra-red image

The detections are then used in the Tracker, which produces tracks that the sensor control can use to support sensor actions in the scenario.