SMACKDOWN: Adventures in Simulation Standards and Interoperability

Overview & Synopsis

The paucity of existing employer-driven simulation education and the need for workers broadly trained in Modeling & Simulation (M&S) poses a critical need that the simulation community as a whole must ad-dress. This paper will describe how this need became an impetus for a new inter-university activity that allows students to learn about simulation by doing it. The event, called Smackdown, was demonstrated for the first time in April at the Spring Simulation Multi-conference. Smackdown is an adventure in in-ternational cooperation. Students and faculty took part from the US and Europe supported by IEEE/SISO standards, industry software and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) content of a re-supply mission to the Moon. The developers see Smackdown providing all participants with a memora-ble, interactive, problem-solving experience, which can contribute, importantly to the workforce of the fu-ture. This is part of the larger need to increase undergraduate education in simulation and could be a prime candidate for senior design projects.