Interpreted Web Services as a Tool for Development of Command and Control Interoperability with Simulations

Real-time interoperation of command and control (C2) and simulation systems is a longstanding goal of the military distributed simulation community. The battle management language (BML) provides a capability for unambiguous communication that supports such a capability. The language is designed around a lexical grammar, conveyed by the extensible markup language (XML). Current implementations provide for asynchronous communication of military plans/orders and reports through a BML Web service (WS), which serves as a repository for BML messages. The Web service stores the elements of BML and their relationships using the joint command, control and consultation information exchange data model (JC3IEDM), which also serves as the basis for the BML vocabulary. This leads to a need to transform information without loss between the input/output language (BML) and the data storage model (JC3IEDM). This paper describes an innovative approach to implementing the BML WS, in the form of a script interpreter. The scripted approach has been proved to support rapid development of new services; also, its script representation offers a promising approach to documenting the transformation mappings in an emerging standard. The paper explains the current state of BML and the rationale for the interpreted BML WS. It also describes the features of the scripting language and some successful uses of the approach. The paper closes with a description of our most recent development: a scripted BML WS with publish-subscribe capabilities.