The U.S. Navy faces complex combat system development and interoperability issues for surface combatants, amphibious ships, and aircraft carriers. Of particular interest is total ship combat system assessment for ship self defense, given by the Probability of Raid Annihilation (P_RA) Measure of Effectiveness (MOE). The P_RA MOE indicates the ability of a ship’s combat system to function as a system-of-systems in coordinated defense against raids of threat anti-ship cruise missiles. For various reasons, the P_RA MOE is both exceedingly difficult and costly to address solely using traditional land-based and at-sea testing.

The Navy Probability of Raid Annihilation (P_RA) Assessment Process was established in 2000 to address this operational test and evaluation (OT&E) issue, with distributed, interoperable simulations in a central role. The Navy P_RA Assessment Process leverages federated simulations of ship combat system elements against independent threats in a common environment to augment live results and formulate an overall combat system assessment. Each new ship class, starting with LPD 17, will build and validate a combat system federation for use in OT&E.

A standard federation framework for use by ship class and element program managers has been implemented in the Navy PRA Simulation Testbed. The PRA testbed architecture defines the standards for: interfacing of combat system element simulations, implementing common threat and environment representations, and realizing integrated hardkill/softkill scenarios. Build 2 of the PRA Simulation Testbed deployed the ship defense federation across a secure WAN among three U.S. sites in April 2003. LPD 17 began their PRA federation development also in April 2003.

VisiTech is the System Engineer for the Navy P_RA Assessment Process and P_RA Testbed. VisiTech also serves as the Development Lead for LPD 17 P_RA federation development.