UTSAF: a multi-agent-based framework for supporting military-based distributed interactive simulations in 3D virtual environments

A military-based distributed interactive simulation (DIS) such as ModSAF has been used for many years. Several problems of the DIS-based simulation to support a large and heterogeneous virtual simulation environments have been discovered. To solve these problems, we propose an architectural multi-agent-based framework to support a large military-based simulation with 3D visualization using inexpensive game simulators. several software agents are used to support interoperability between DIS-based military simulation nodes and unreal tournament game simulators. A software agent is used to reduce DIS traffic to efficiently utilize network bandwidth. It also performs protocol conversion between DIS protocol and a game engine protocol. Additionally, using a multi-agent system, our work is easily expandable to support several network environments and also to support agent-based intelligent operations. Our main contribution is twofold. We use multi-agent system which is scalable to support our framework. In addition, our framework builds a simulation bridge that enables affordable high-quality 3D viewer node using affordable game simulations for military simulations.