Proceedings of the 2016 Winter Simulation Conference T. M. K. Roeder, P. I. Frazier, R. Szechtman, E. Zhou, T. Huschka, and S. E. Chick, eds. TUTORIAL ON THE ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES OF COMBAT MODELING AND DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION Andreas Tolk Simulation Engineering The MITRE Corporation 903 Enterprise Pkwy Suite 200 Hampton, VA 20666, USA ABSTRACT This advanced tutorial introduces the engineering principles of combat modeling and distributed simulation. It starts with the historical context and introduces terms and definitions as well as guidelines of interest in this domain. The combat modeling section introduces the main concepts for modeling of the environment, movement, effects, sensing, communications, and decision making. The distributed simulation section focuses on the challenges of current simulation interoperability standards that support dealing with them. Overall, the tutorial shall introduce the scholar to the operational view (what needs to be modeled), the conceptual view (how to do combat modeling), and the technical view (how to conduct distributed simulation). 1 INTRODUCTION Combat modeling and distributed simulation are very challenging and interesting topics. I have been teaching a graduate course on this topic for several years at the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Over the development of the course, more and more students not working in combat modeling related domains joined me, as the complexity of challenges of their domains could often be mapped to the topics of this course, that in many aspects became a course for engineering managers and system engineers in charge of complex simulation-based projects. After the first couple of iterations I decided that I needed a textbook that addresses all the various challenges, which with the help of friends who are experts in their related domains I finally finished some years ago (Tolk 2012). Following the experiences made in teaching this topic for a diverse student body, I structured the topic into four sections. First, I provide a historical context for the domain of combat modeling and distributed simulation. As discussed in (Page and Smith 1998), the military domain has its own language and is often separated from other simulation experts. The second section therefore explains the general concepts by providing the terms and definitions as well as the universe of discourse for combat models and distributed simulation systems. The next section introduces the referential domain of combat modeling. It looks into concepts and models to cope with the situated environment used to describe the virtual battle space, how to move in it, which effects can occur, and what models are used to represent sensing, communicating, and making decisions. In combat models, these often boil down to move, shoot, look, and communicate. The final section deals with the methodological domain of distributed simulation, including discussions of supporting simulation interoperability standards, such as the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocol (IEEE 2012) and the High Level Architecture (HLA) (IEEE 2010). The objective of this tutorial is that the participant will understand the main principles of combat modeling and distributed simulation. He will know the basic algorithms, constraints, and application areas, and the interplay between the different challenges. Through methods from the fields of operations research, 978-1-5090-4486-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 255