Integrated Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization

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The Ceres Mission Simulation Environment is an immersive, visualization, and simulation toolkit that combines gaming technologies with geographic information systems (GIS) to provide an integrated simulation, training, and mission development framework.  The VSP Toolkit was developed using Microsoft .NET technology and applied using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabling users to create high-fidelity, distributed simulations on low-cost Microsoft Windows-based PCs.

Traditional virtual environments rely on static database generation processes that are labor-intensive and time-consuming to develop.  Large data sets are available for the entire world but are stored in formats not directly compatible with real-time 3-D applications used for interactive simulation. VSP was designed to streamline the processes of transforming source data to efficient storage formats combined with web services for real-time applications using an asynchronous or “On-the-fly” construction process.  This allows the system to provide high-fidelity image generation while performing simulations of mission events.  Processor-intensive tasks for sensor rendering, terrain construction, and image processing are offloaded to a set of web services.

VSP provides a framework for managing technologies and data using an integrated library of software tools that can be applied directly to the application requirements.  This approach supports rapid application prototyping, development, and testing through a common framework. Primitive components provide building blocks for developing more complex systems that can be reused across applications.  Ceres also supports a plug-in-based extensible software model for specialized component development.