A Grammar-Based Web Service Enabling Multi-domain Distributed Interoperation of Command/Control and Simulation Systems

The joint battle management language (JBML) project is at the forefront of the current interest in supporting development of distributed systems with simulation elements by means of Web services. This paper reports on work to develop an extensible capability to serve as a basis to expand JBML coherently, in multiple domains of warfare simulation (land, air, and maritime). The project has created a schema for a Web service that serves as the external interface for orders being pushed into the Web service by the different military components' domain-unique command and control (C2) systems, and pulled from the service by different simulations that function as a cooperating system. The Web service consists of multiple, re-usable layers in an open source implementation that is intended to serve as a basis for an expanding open standards development effort for the coalition battle management language. We report on the approach used to design and develop the schema and supporting Web service based on a lexical grammar, and the results when three C2 systems and two simulation systems were combined, using the Web service as its core.