Mission rehearsal & mission planning are among the most expected usages of simulation ; however, so far, users have been reluctant to imagine that such goals were reachable. Indeed, what makes mission rehearsal so complex is the time frame of the mission. In a matter of hours, the operational unit that needs to prepare the mission has to produce or gather the data, including real time data coming from live sensors (UAV, ...) on the battlefield, prototype the terrain (and order of battle), create the scenario and assess it. Classical use of simulation in terms of mission rehearsal & planning are : technical preparation (e.g. cruise missile flight plan), action modes assessment, immersive visualization.
For a long time, people have been pessimistic about this usage of simulation, stating that it was almost impossible to find the optimal solution in such a short amount of time. Nowadays, mentalities are changing, and this seminar was a good opportunity to assess a few ideas :
- Even if the time constraints do not guarantee to identify the best solution, the idea is to find a solution that is "good enough".
- The simulation will not yield a solution but will provide the operational with a metric to assess its mission parameters.
- Each party should do what it does best: the human will conceive mission plans, the computer will simulate them at high speed ; at the end, the decision will always be human.
High performance simulation is now made possible by the ability to have very powerful architectures (near 1 TFlops) on the terrain, interconnected (if needed) with C4I systems, for a relatively low price. Until now, mission planning and mission rehearsal were secluded in headquarters - our guess is that tomorrow, we will see hardened "battlefield computers" allowing mission rehearsal on the terrain, inside the shelters. Compared to cluster solutions, such low cost, portable, simulation solutions have the advantage of using COTS and not requiring high maintenance. High performance simulation could be the "Swiss Army Knife" of tomorrow's command posts.
