Collaborative enterprise & virtual prototyping (CEVP), a product-centric approach to distributed simulation

The downsizing of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the associated reduction in budgets has re-emphasized the need for commonality, reuse, and standards with respect to the way DoD does business. DoD has implemented significant changes in how it buys weapon systems. The new emphasis is on concurrent engineering with integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD) and collaboration with Integrated Product Teams (IPTs). The new DoD vision includes Simulation Based Acquisition (SBA), a process supported by robust, collaborative use of simulation technology that is integrated across acquisition phases and programs. This paper discusses the Air Force Research Laboratory's efforts to use Modeling and Simulation (M&S) resources within a Collaborative Enterprise Environment (CEE) to support SEA and other Collaborative Enterprise and Virtual Prototyping (CEVP) applications. The paper will discuss four technology areas: 1) a Processing Ontology that defines a hierarchically nested set of collaboration contexts needed to organize and support multi-disciplinary collaboration using M&S, 2) a partial taxonomy of intelligent agents needed to manage different M&S resource contributions to advancing the state of product development, 3) an agent-based process for interfacing disparate M&S resources into a CEVP framework, and 4) a Model-View-Control (MVC) based approach to defining "a new way of doing business" for users of CEVP frameworks/systems.