SBIR-STTR Award

The need to support collaborative development efforts in the field of modeling and simulation is widely recognized. Although recently developed technologies and systems address this issue, a large number of legacy systems and applications are still in use throughout DoD that are neither inherently collaborative nor easily reusable within collaborative environments. A need, therefore, exists to bring these existing systems and applications into the collaborative environment. The effort proposed here addresses this need by utilizing the Collaborative Enterprise Environment (CEE), currently under development by AFRL, as a platform for extending Advanced Khoros, a powerful software development environment and suite of tools for image and signal processing that has been widely used for the development of DoD M&S applications. The result will be a version of Advanced Khoros that supports collaborative development and component reuse. Key technologies that will make this effort possible include CORBA, the Khoros workspace compiler, and Java. The resulting system, which we call the Visual Interactive Programming for Enterprise Research, or VIPER, will allow Advanced Khoros development tools to operate within a multi-platform collaborative environment and enable existing legacy systems to be used with this environment.

Collaborative engineering and development are paramount to supporting new warfighter-driven programs like Simulation Based Acquisition (SBA) and Simulation Based Design (SBD). AFRL's Collaborative Enterprise Environment (CEE) enhances Directorate research and development, exploration, evaluation, planning, and transition of technologies by enabling collaboration and technology integration. However, there are a large number of legacy systems and applications that are neither inherently collaborative nor easily reusable within a colIaborative environment. Many algorithms and models have been implemented under a variety of DoD programs using Khoros, a powerful software development and visual programming environment, that facilitates the integra-tion of legacy code as well as the development of new solutions. The proposed effort will extend Khoros to operate within the CEE, seamlessly supporting collaborative development and code reuse. These extensions will use Khoros' flexible code generation system and visual workspace compiler, CORBA and Java. The resulting system is calIed Visual Interactive Programming for Enterprise Research (VIPER). VIPER will enable the Khoros visual programming environment and software development tools to fully operate within the multi-platform CEE and enable existing legacy systems to be integrated with this environment. VIPER also enables CEE to capitalize on Khoros' extensive user base in both government and private sectors.

Keywords:
COLLABORATIVE ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTCEE KHOROS VISUAL PROGRAMMING CANTATA JAVA COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE