While VR-Exchange has always supported DIS and HLA through the RPR FOM (multiple versions), this year MÄK is making a concerted effort to broaden our support for other commonly used FOMs and protocols.

To this end, we have recently added several new brokers to support FOMs used extensively by the US DoD. We have started with a broker to support the MATREX Federation. We currently support MATREX version 7.x, but will upgrade to version 8.0 when it is released later this year. In the past we have had limited support for MATREX via a FOM Mapper plug-in. While this limited approach worked, we believe it was not very robust. All new translation to the MATREX FOM is done through a new stand-alone broker, offering robust and MATREX-specific translation options. Additionally, we are pleased to announce support for the Joint Land Component Constructive Training Capability (JLCCTC) Multi-Resolution Federation (MRF). We will also begin work on JLCCTC-Entity Resolution Federation (ERF) support in the coming months.

Last week a couple of other MÄKers and I once again made the trip down to Orlando to attend the biannual Simulation Interoperability Workshop (SIW). I’m sure many of you are familiar with the workshop, but for those of you who don’t know it, SIW is where people in the simulation industry from around the world meet to discuss the work they’ve been doing in simulation interoperability and develop the standards that the industry uses. This is where standards such as HLA and DIS are developed.

The workshop consisted of the usual presentations and development group meetings. To me, one of the most interesting was the RPR FOM revival meeting. There is a new push right now to restart the RPR FOM Product Development Group (PDG) and finalize the RPR FOM 2 standard. There are currently several draft versions of the standard, but nothing official. As a result, different simulations will end up using slightly different versions of RPR 2. At MÄK, we’ve added support in our products for a few of the more popular RPR 2 drafts, but we are definitely interested in seeing the standard finalized. We’re excited to be part of the RPR FOM 2 standardization effort, and we hope that RPR will continue beyond that as well. After all, the new version of DIS is nearing completion, so the RPR FOM will need to keep up.