A virtual collaboration testbed (VCT) for joint campaign battle management and mission planning

The Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Center for Space Technology, Mission Development Branch and Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation, are developing a Virtual Collaboration Testbed (VCT) as a distributed computing framework that supports the gathering of human and computer-based assets to collaborate for mission planning and campaign battle management activities. The NRL VCT will provide a means to judge the effectiveness of Command and Control (C2) decision support applications and to develop a strategy to maximize the return on investments. In this paper we discuss the design and configuration of VCT to meet the Navy's requirements for decision support, such as campaign-level battle management and joint force mission planning.