Effective Applications is Supporting the MATREX Program

Effective Applications is leading the Architect and Systems Engineering efforts for the Modeling Architecture for Technology, Research and EXperimentation (MATREX) program. The MATREX program is a U.S. Army program within Research Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) and is managed by the Simulation & Training Technology Center (STTC) in Orlando, Florida. Effective Applications is a subcontractor to Dynamic Animation Systems (DAS) for systems engineering, architecture and management support.

The MATREX program's purpose is to develop a composable Modeling and Simulation (M&S) environment wherein a collection of multi-fidelity models, simulations and tools can be integrated, and mapped to an established architecture for conducting analysis, experimentation and technology trade-offs for RDECOM and others. We develop and maintain distributed M&S tools, processes and models that can are used interchangeably across the DoD M&S community.

The MATREX systems engineering process and System Design Description (SDD) tool is an innovative application of industry best practices to the distributed M&S community. The MATREX SDD concept and implementation has been published in conferences and journals including the Simulation Interoperability Workshop (SIW), Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS) Military Modeling and Simulation Symposium (MMS) and the Modeling & Simulation Information Analysis Center (MSIAC) journal. The SDD provides a way to link high level warfare modeling requirements to multiple design choices, which are also aligned to technical requirements for interoperability. The tool is database-driven so views such as sequence diagrams, publish/subscribe matrices, object model, etc. can be generated rather than maintained within documents and spreadsheets by sometimes error-prone engineering teams. The design most applicable to the required system can be chosen based resolution, fidelity and data requirements. This tool allows for the top-down systems engineering approach of integrating models' business logic rather than jamming models together through a common object model. The M&S community is becoming more familiar with the need to have semantic and functional integration of models rather than just translating models to use the same object models which only accomplishes syntactical compatibility, but may not accomplish the required Systems of Systems (SoS) M&S goal.

The MATREX government-owned tools include: The ProtoCore, a software library to help connect models to M&S middleware including HLA 1.3, HLA 1516, TENA and SORD, A Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) NG 1.3 implementation to run an HLA federation, and Advanced Testing Capability (ATC) application that facilitates black-box testing of a sequence of events for federated models over the middleware.

The MATREX program has won numerous awards, most recently the DoD M&S Award for Test and Evaluation, the U.S. Army M&S Award for Test & Evaluation and the 2009 U.S. Army M&S Award for Cross-Cutting Technology.

To learn more about the MATREX program visit https://www.matrex.rdecom.army.mil. To learn more about how Effective Applications supports the MATREX, contact us through our contact page.