Development and Run-time Environment for Aviation Models (DREAM)

Air Traffic Control is a critical function in the U.S. Army, the proper training of which remains of utmost importance to maintain a safe, orderly, and expeditious flow of military air traffic. Fully staffing simulated training exercises with qualified human pilots can be costly and difficult to organize. Instead, Computer Generated Forces (CGFs) are often used in their place, controlled by “pucksters.” However, CGFs across distributed simulations have varying capabilities, requiring multiple, specialized pucksters, each of which is costly to train. Furthermore, creating, updating, and integrating these brittle CGFs requires technical expertise by training staff. As a result, automated behaviors are no cheaper and often less capable than staffing simulations with human pilots. To bridge the gap between simulation-specific CGFs interfaces and human operators, we propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a Development and Run-time Environment for Aviation Models (DREAM), an end-user development and run-time environment for creating and executing proxy models. These proxy models provide connective logic between high-level commands and CGF-specific instructions. The proposed system will be built upon AgentWorks™, a robust set of behavior modeling and analysis tools that enable the design, construction, and testing of complex intelligent systems through an intuitive graphical user interface.