MODELING AND SIMULATION (M&S) GUIDANCE FOR THE ACQUISITION WORKFORCE (OCT 2008) (VERSION 1.01)

MODELING AND SIMULATION (M&S) GUIDANCE FOR THE ACQUISITION WORKFORCE (OCT 2008) (VERSION 1.01)., Issued by the Department of Defense Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology Systems and Software Engineering Developmental Test and Evaluation. Modeling and Simulation (M&S) capabilities and limitations are often not adequately understood and M&S is sometimes not planned and managed with sufficient care. Although we can model many things quite credibly today, such as physical capabilities, natural phenomena, and physics-based interactions, it is much more difficult to reliably represent things we understand less well, such as human behavior, reliability, and emergent behaviors of complex systems. It must also be remembered that M&S capability involves not just the software tools themselves, but the data that feeds them; the computing platforms that execute them; the standards, middleware and networks that may interconnect them; the encryption capabilities and security constraints that protect them; and, most importantly, the people that plan, develop, integrate, verify, validate, accredit and use them. Deficiencies in any of these present a risk to a program. This guidance is intended to help acquisition managers approach the use of M&S wisely and plan carefully for issues that should be addressed.