Expanded building hosts real-time simulation of theatre air battle environment
Boeing has opened its relocated and expanded Virtual Warfare Center (VWC) as it seeks ways to involve warfighters in the development of network-centric systems. The VWC in St Louis, Missouri has been upgraded to simulate a theatre air battle involving thousands of entities.
The expanded centre is an outgrowth of a facility that originated 15 years ago when it was first used by the US Air Force to simulate fighter engagements against small cross-section targets using advanced air-to-air missiles, says Bob Schraeder, VWC manager.
McDonnell Douglas, later Boeing, was funded to grow the simulation environment, and late last month the newly revamped centre hosted a major exercise involving 150 operators in a real-time simulation of a 2012-15 air defence environment, including classified and conceptual systems.
The company-funded expansion has created a mirror image of the government facility where Boeing can experiment with network-centric systems in a less sensitive environment, with the intention of involving warfighters already on site using the government side in their development, says Schraeder.
The centre features Blue and Red cells for command and control of friendly and enemy forces, plus a White cell to monitor and control the simulation. There are individual rooms with operator simulators for the E-3 airborne warning and control system, plus Aegis, Patriot, SL-AMRAAM and other air-defence systems.
There are also up to eight cockpit simulators that can be rapidly reconfigured between the F-15, F/A-18 and F/A-22.
Boeing has upgraded its virtual theatre air battle (VTAB) simulation tool to Version 5.0, which can model 2,000 six-degree-of-freedom digital entities, says Schraeder. This compares with the 400-500 simulated on the government side using the previous VTAB version. "By the end of the year we will have more," he says. Next year, the simulation will be upgraded to enable computer-generated entities to adapt their behaviour "intelligently".
The VWC is connected to Boeing's other modelling and simulation laboratories via the LabNet high-bandwidth network to enable system-of-systems demonstration and development.
These can include command-and-control simulations in southern California; maritime surveillance in Seattle, Washington; combat helicopters in Mesa, Arizona; and mobility in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
GRAHAM WARWICK/ST LOUIS
Source: Flight International
