Boeing Working Hard to Promote Virtual Warfare Center
Boeing is working hard here and in the U.S. to promote its expertise
in realistic and very complicated command-and-control simulations.
A new technology being adopted by the company's Virtual Warfare
Center (VWC) is aimed at overcoming an inherent problem with large-scale
scenarios-the sheer time taken to 'script' the actions and reactions
of hundreds of actors on the battlefield. "It takes six weeks
to script 200 objects," says VWC manager Bob Schraeder. "When
we get up to 8,000 actors, we need automatic, autonomous operators."
The cure is DOC-the Digital Object Controller. In its first form,
DOC is "almost a pseudo-pilot, an intelligent agent,"
says Schraeder. Using a concept familiar to computer-game designers,
DOC is a software package that can operate a vehicle in the same
way as a pilot, reacting to other events and learning from experience.
To some extent, DOC has evolved from the Pilot's Associate program
of the 1980s and the more recent Rotorcraft Pilot's Associate,
which were designed as intelligent decision-aiding tools. However,
the current technology is owned by its creator and licensed to
Boeing, and is extremely powerful, says Schraeder. "We have
to place bounds, to stop it learning too much," he says.
"We don't want to create a ten-foot-tall enemy and make our
own systems unaffordable." Currently used to control individual
vehicles, DOC is likely to be able to develop battle plans for
enemy forces in future simulations.
