A Visual Language for Composable Simulation Scenarios

Modeling and Simulation plays an important role in how the Air Force trains and fights. Scenarios are used in simulation to give users the ability to specify entities and behaviors that should be simulated by a model: however, building and understanding scenarios can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Furthermore, as composable simulations become more prominent, the need for a common descriptor for simulation scenarios has become evident. In order to reduce the complexity of creating and understanding simulation scenarios, a visual language was created. The research on visual languages presented in this thesis examines methods of visually specifying the high-level behavior of entities in scenarios and how to represent the hierarchy of the entities in scenarios. Through a study of current behavior specification techniques and the properties of mission-level simulation scenarios, Simulation Behavior Specification Diagrams (SBSD) were developed to represent the behavior of entities in scenarios. Additionally, the information visualization technique of treemaps was adapted to represent the hierarchy of entities in scenarios. After completing case studies on scenarios for the OneSAF simulation model, SBSDs and the application of treemaps to scenarios was considered successful. SBSD diagrams accurately represented the behavior of entities in the simulation scenarios and through software can be converted into code for use by simulation models. The treemap displayed the hierarchy of the entities along with information about the relative size of the entities when applied to simulation scenarios.

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