Using Business Technologies to Cut Simulation Support Costs
(Room S320B)
30 Nov 17
11:00 AM
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11:30 AM
The use of simulation to achieve training and test and evaluation goals requires technical support staff to execute complex processes and complicated, labor-intensive activities. The need for support increases as the Army interoperates live, virtual, and constructive simulations together.
Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) developed an enterprise architecture, the Live-Synthetic, Training, and Test and Evaluation Enterprise Architecture (LSTTE EA). One of the goals of this enterprise architecture was to allow stakeholders from the training and test & evaluation communities to manage the linkages between the Technical Reference Architecture (TRA), business processes and governance structures and to facilitate discussions within the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) community. Toward that end, PEO STRI developed a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) software implementation of the LSTTE EA technical reference architecture, also known as the LSTTE Infrastructure Architecture (LSTTE IA). This paper describes our use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and business process modeling in the PoC implementation of the TRA, and how it reduces the need for technical support and expertise. We give an overview of the LSTTE EA and the LSTTE IA and a detailed explanation of the framework that includes the IaC and the business process modeling. Using this approach, we can capture processes and automate the execution of tasks today performed by “touch” labor and technical experts. This is not to say we eliminate all human tasks. Certain tasks require direct human decisions or input and are not fully automatable. In our experience, these decisions are generally operational in nature and do not call for great technical expertise in the underlying training simulation systems. The paper presents a comparison of the technical support and expertise needed to conduct training today and how the PoC reduces the need for this technical support and exper