Modeling of standards-based commercial off the shelf (SCOTS) products for use in DoD environments

The current DoD policy for acquisition reform uses standards-based commercial off-the-shelf (SCOTS) products whenever possible to avoid development costs of new systems acquisition. Adapting a commercial standard to make it useable for a specific application requires that the standard be evaluated and tested to ensure compliance and to ensure that a non-conforming variation to the standard is not created. When choosing a commercial standard for DoD, there are overlapping areas within the standard and the application. These overlapping areas within DoD contain critical areas that must be tested or simulated to verify their compliance with the standard. These critical areas frequently require simulation to evaluate their effectiveness without building a complex lab set up. These critical areas include new protocols, loading analysis, flow control, interoperability and error correction. Simulating a protocol or introducing errors in a simulation may be much more cost effective than conducting actual testing. This approach requires that the requisite test areas are conducted in the lab and the difficult or impossible test points are conducted through simulation. Simulation complements the lab testing and saves the cost of expensive test equipment. This paper examines the use of simulation to evaluate SCOTS products, presents the lessons learned in developing the simulations and gives an overview of the simulations developed for the chosen standard.