• 
• 

Published on April 25, 2008

Jirapan Boonnoon

The Nation

The system, which has been christened the Army Tactical Level Advanced Simulation (Atlas), has been developed by Infowave (Thailand).

Managing director Pongsatorn Sukhum said Atlas created a tactical-level simulation for use by the various commands and Army staff in training staff-level officers and students to conduct command-post exercises.

Atlas is equipped with the concepts used in military operations and based on a scalable architecture, allowing for flexibility.

Each side can be divided into several divisions, including tactical-, main- and rear-command posts. These participants may be further grouped into combat, combat-support and combat-service-support roles.

"The system enables simulation of attrition resulting from close combat, direct and indirect fire and air support. It is an aggregated, distributed, tactical-level, constructive simulator with variable-time resolution," Pongsatorn said.

Atlas is a distributed, tactical-level simulator providing realistic terrain effects based on real terrain data, such as elevation, vegetation and irrigation.

Pongsatorn said the Atlas client interface contained all familiar military commands, symbols, military grid-reference system coordinates and military-time formats, thus shortening the learning curve. The system includes a graphical tool for creating unit prototypes and is based on object-oriented technology and eXtensible Markup Language.

"The system can fulfil the goal of battle training by reducing the unit preparation time of several months down to a few days. It eliminates the discrepancy between the 1:50,000 scale maps from the Royal Thai Survey Department that students use now and digital representation of the same terrain within previous simulations," Pongsatorn said.

Atlas supports both English and Thai. Besides the domestic market, the company plans will also distribute its system in Europe.