ORLANDO, Fla., 5 Dec. 2006. MÄK Technologies, a supplier of distributed simulation software, and Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI), the producer of commercial off-the-shelf software for integrated analysis of land, sea, air, and space assets, announced that under a new partnership agreement, AGI will license MÄK's VR-Link networking toolkit to create a High Level Architecture (HLA) and Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) extension to the real-time capabilities of its core analysis software, STK.
This integration links STK to HLA- or DIS-compliant distributed simulations, allowing users to map data from HLA and DIS interactions using configuration files and minimal coding.
"The partnership between AGI and MÄK is a big step forward in bringing together the operational and simulation worlds," says Kevin Flood, AGI's director of product management. "The same tools AGI develops for real-time decision support for space, missile, communications, radar, and air operations will now be linked to large-scale simulations and war-gaming activities, bringing an extremely robust analytical product to the aerospace, defense and intelligence communities."
AGI's commercial off-the-shelf STK software combines validated and verified analytical algorithms with a complex physics-based geometry engine. The software models the position of objects and their movement over time; analyzes the relationships among multiple objects; and determines the quality of those relationships. Integrating VR-Link with STK will add AGI's analysis strengths to simulations, including orbit/trajectory ephemeris generation and sensor coverage analysis for any of the objects modeled in the STK environment. Applying DIS or HLA protocols in STK will also enhance the ability to define when vehicles, sensors, ground sites, and other objects are in view of each other.
MÄK Technologies' VR-Link is a networking toolkit for linking simulations via the Department of Defense HLA, DIS or TENA networking protocols. It provides a single documented API that abstracts away the details of the networking protocols. VR-Link-based simulations can maintain native compliance with HLA, DIS and TENA with a single code base.
