The Maritime Virtual Environment Data Specification (MARVEDS) Working Group was established and fostered by the Navy Modeling and Simulation Office (NAVMSMO, N61M) Navy programs that use simulations can address jointly the creation of a maritime virtual environment representation that is consistent and sufficient and that can be shared by and across programs. Consistency means establishing a level playing field across all components of the simulation and federation of simulations with respect to the natural environment. Sufficient means providing just enough natural environment information to meet the needs of the simulation or federation. This work will culminate in the establishment of a standards-based natural environment representation provided in a separate federate that can be linked with other simulations/stimulations to form a federation that produces reliable results.

The MARVEDS program is requirements-based and examines the natural environment as it affects the various military components and their interactions as represented in the simulations. This approach complements that of the Modeling and Simulation Executive Agents (MSEAs) working for their individual Services and through the Defense Modeling and simulation Office (DMSO) to standardize the creation and delivery of environmental information. The MARVEDS effort brings focuses on the M&S Maritime phenomenon and thus compliments the significant emphasis placed on terrain modeling and implementation by the Joint M&S community

Requirements in Modeling & Simulation are not well documented and generally are not specific enough to include the detailed functional requirements for the natural environment representation. The Environment Concept Model is the procedure developed the MARVEDS program to solve the problem of identifying the requirements for a natural environment representation that is both consistent and sufficient for a particular simulation or federation. The procedure includes both the process and a product. The ECM process is general and can be applied to any simulation or federation. The ECM product is specific to a given simulation or federation. Thus, applying the ECM process to the Integrated Ship Defense (ISD) program resulted in the ISD ECM, a product that contains the requirements for the natural environment representation that is both consistent and sufficient for the ISD simulation. In addition to establishing detailed requirements, the ECM product provides detailed documentation that is a critical part of a viable VV&A process.

To date, the ECM process has been applied to several Navy programs. The resulting individual ECMs are being analyzed to extract the general requirements for a consistent and sufficient natural environment representation for all naval warfare areas—air, surface, underwater, littoral and expeditionary. These general requirements will be used to develop and promulgate standards for representing the natural environment for distributed simulations. Standards include data representations, grids structures for providing data at the appropriate spatial resolutions, serving practices for delivering data at intervals that account for the natural dynamism of the environment and best practices for developing a common understanding of the environment effects models.

The standards development for the maritime natural environment representation will be coordinated with related standards being developed elsewhere by working with the Navy M&S Standards Group, DMSO, SISO and other established standards groups.