NEW TEXTBOOK BY TOLK ADDRESSES CHALLENGES OF COMBAT MODELING AND DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION

A new textbook written by Andreas Tolk, professor of engineering management and systems engineering, looks at modeling and simulation in a combat setting in a new way.

The 936-page book, "Engineering Principles of Combat Modeling and Distributed Simulation," is published by Wiley, and is available in electronic format on Kindle and Nook. It will be released in print at the end of March.

The book addresses the challenges of combat modeling and distributed simulation, covering the foundations of the topic, and discusses modeling of the environment, movement, sensing and effects, while also addressing standards for distributed simulation. Putting all of these pieces together in a single text is significant.

"While all other books in this domain successfully highlight special topics in detail, none of them compiles the basic knowledge of all contributing fields that a simulation engineer needs to be aware of, in particular when he or she starts a job. To my knowledge, none of the existing books give the required holistic overview of combat modeling and distributed simulation needed to get a primary understanding of the challenges," Tolk wrote in the book's initial chapter.

Tolk is a worldwide expert in the issue of standardization of interoperability in modeling and simulation. He will conduct a workshop on "Interoperability Frameworks - Designing Models and Simulations to Be interoperable and Composable in the First Place," during Simulation Australia's SimTecT symposium in Adelaide, Australia, in June. SimTecT is the main modeling and simulation conference held annually in the South Pacific, attracting more than 450 attendees from around the world.

SimTecT features discussion of simulation issues in areas such as defense, education, emergency management and transportation.