DIS: Other PDUs

Don McGregor

Research Associate

MOVES Institute

mcgredo@nps.edu

Other PDUs

• We’ve concentrated on the ESPDU so far. Studies of DIS simulation traffic show that more than 95% of the PDUs in a DIS simulation are ESPDUs. But what about the others?

• A few dozen other PDUs. DIS also handles simulations of logistics and radio comms, some physics (collisions), and shooting

Fire & Detonation PDUs

• Fire PDU contains ID of entity doing the shooting, ID of the entity target, ID for the munition type, quantity, rate, fuse, warhead, range to target, and location of the firing event

• Generally you create a new entity to describe the munition in flight

• The Detonation pdu has similar information, including the location of the impact

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Fire & Detonation

• Shooting in DIS is done on the honor system. – The shooter generates a Fire PDU, with information

about who is shooting, what they’re shooting, and their intended target, using entity IDs and entity types

– A new entity may be generated for the munition in flight (eg a shell from a cannon) or the entity make be something carried by an aircraft (a missile)

– The simulation decides where the munition explodes and issues a Detonation PDU

– Other entities note the detonation and assess their own damage, based on the type of explosion and weapon

• This makes it easy to cheat!

Collision PDU

• The collision PDU is issued when two entities collide. The information includes the two entity IDs, velocity at impact, and the mass.

• Each simulation application sends out a collision PDU in the event a collision is detected

Logistics PDUs

• DIS can also handle logistics. This requires some moderately involved state machines in the implementation, which would be a good class project

DIS 200x

• DIS was recently updated to version 7. The prior version 6, was released in 1998

• Includes at least two new PDUs for directed energy weapons

• Mostly backwards compatible, the standards documentation is vastly improved

DIS Standards Process

• DIS is controlled by a group at SISO (sisostds.org)

• They develop & maintain the standard. Major revs are approved by IEEE via a process with a lot of bureaucratic overhead (not necessarily a bad thing)

• You can join the group if you like (anyone with SISO membership can join)

DIS Support

• A support mailing list is available for standards questions

• http://www.sisostds.org/index.php?tg=articles&idx=More&article=449&topics=110

• DIS Plain and simple:• http://www.sisostds.org/index.php?tg=filema

n&idx=list&id=12&gr=Y&path=10+-+DIS+-+Plain+and+Simple