Object-oriented simulation in a concurrent multi-user environment

The Battlefield Sensor Simulator (BSS) system, built at RSRE Malvern, provides for the modelling and performance evaluation of new and proposed military sensor systems. Both sensor tasking and sensor mixes may be tested interactively. The BSS system covers a battlefield area of up to 50000 square kilometres and can simulate the movement of up to 100000 targets in real time. The architecture of the BSS consists of a centralised computing facility which models battlefield terrain, culture and scenarios together with a collection of client computers which model battlefield sensors. The authors discuss the object-oriented framework which is constituted by a collection of objects known as the Generic Object Set (GOS). The object-oriented framework is written in the programming language Simogen which is an object based version of C. In Simogen, objects have state variables and procedural responses. An important feature of the BSS system is that it can support concurrent sensor models running on different client computers. In the future this will form a basis from which the data fusion of different sensor systems may be modelled