Developing a blast injury modeling capability: application of concepts from the defense M&S domain

Increases in computational power have contributed to growing interest in using modeling and simulation (M&S) to better understand and address blast injury for US service members. The development of an M&S capability that can comprehensively simulate human injury, lethality, and impairment due to blast injury threats in the military environment requires a large, coordinated integration of many models and simulations. This contribution describes how various lessons learned from the defense M&S domain were used to support the future development of an envisioned Modeling Capability for blast injury by providing simulation functionality for simulation-based experimentation. It first addresses conceptually the interoperability challenges when more than one simulation can be or must be applied and possibly composed for the experiment. This leads to the development of a proposed concept of operations for the application of the Modeling Capability and the development of a framework of services needed to allow the identification of an applicable simulation solution, selecting the subset of those simulations, composing them for the experiment, and assessing the results. As a nascent endeavor, anticipated challenges for implementing these concepts are discussed, leveraging lessons learned regarding interoperability, composability, use of services, repositories, and development of simulation compositions to conduct simulation-based experiments.