I/ITSEC is the Interservice Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference, the world's largest Modeling, Simulation and Training event!

Tutorial 1937 is Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) 101 by Don Brutzman and Christian Fitzpatrick of Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute.

Abstract. The Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocol is a well-established IEEE standard for packet-level exchange of state information between entities in military simulations.  DIS facilitates simulation interoperability through a consistent over-the-wire format for information, widely agreed upon constant enumeration values, and community-consensus semantics.

Anyone can obtain the IEEE-1278 standard and implement their own compliant, interoperable, DIS application. A large variety of tools and codebases simplify this effort, and enable multi-architecture integration of simulations using the DIS stand baseline. DIS focus begins with real-time, physics-based, entity-scale simulations, providing state update and interaction mechanisms which can scale to large virtual environments.

This tutorial is a “DIS 101” introduction for software implementers and an introduction to the DIS philosophy for simulation systems integrators.  Examples are provided using the open-source Open-DIS library for DIS v7 support, available in multiple programming languages.  Ongoing work is included in WebRTC browser streaming, experimental implementation of DIS v8, plus Web-based implementations using 2D maps and X3D Graphics.

References:

• Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) 101 Tutorial: The Basics
• Github Open-DIS Software Archive
• X3D and DIS X3D for Advanced Modeling
• Repeatable Unit Testing of Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Protocol Behavior Streams using Web Standards
• Tutorial tweets