A Reconfigurable Integration Test and Simulation Bed for Engagement Control Using Virtualization

Abstract

Modeling and Simulation(M&S) technology has been widely used to solve constraints such as time, space, safety, and cost when we implement the same development and test environments as real warfare environments to develop, test, and evaluate weapon systems for the last several decades. The integration and test environments employed for development and test & evaluation are required to provide Live Virtual Construction(LVC) simulation environments for carrying out requirement analysis, design, integration, test and verification. Additionally, they are needed to provide computing environments which are possible to reconfigure computing resources and software components easily according to test configuration changes, and to run legacy software components independently on specific hardware and software environments. In this paper, an Integration Test and Simulation for Engagement Control(ITSEC) bed using a bare-metal virtualization mechanism is proposed to meet the above test and simulation requirements, and it is applied and implemented for an air missile defense system. The engagement simulation experiment results conducted on air and missile defense environments demonstrate that the proposed bed is a sufficiently cost-effective and feasible solution to reconfigure and expand application software and computing resources in accordance with various integration and test environments.