Overview

The Operations Room Team Trainer (ORTT) provides the Royal Canadian Navy with equipment and operations training in a combat Canadian Patrol Frigate (CPF) environment. This paper discusses the ORTT Communications Simulation subsystem, which was developed by Advanced Simulation Technology under contract to Lockheed-Martin, Canada. The ORTT required a communications system able to support one hundred and seventy operator input/output voice channels with some positions receiving up to 15 simultaneous voice streams. The system required reproduction of several complex communications panels. It also required simulation of the versatile SHips INternal COMmunications system (SHINCOM) along with panel logic functions for several other communications devices.

ASTi has a sales engineering staff, but does not have the administrative personnel to support a labor-intensive project. These cost and schedule imperatives led to a program plan which minimized project-specific effort. The entire communication system was created from a small set of sub-system modules allowing custom designs to proceed in parallel with volume production. Design review documents and "custom" SDRLS were submitted on time with minimal support costs. In addition, an innovative ATM-like cell communication structure was developed to transmit both voice and data between the panels and processing nodes of the system.

This paper describes the main features of the system architecture. It also outlines how COTS techniques were used to reduce cost and schedule.

The top-level layout of the ORTT communications system layout is shown in Figure 1.

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