Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

With the rapid advances of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) and cloud computing, 3D modelling and simulation (M&S) is becoming more accessible. 3D M&S is quickly making their way into a broad range of use cases such as aviation, military, emergency response, healthcare, city planning and educations. M&S applications require a unified 3D Synthetic Environment (SE) representation of the world that can be shared, reused, and repurposed while meeting the requirements of high-performance and consistency. However, most M&S applications still require their proprietary and application-specific SE datastores, that are not interoperable. In order to create a common SE database that represents the 3D world that can be reused by multiple M&S applications, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) published the CDB standard in 2017. The OGC CDB standard defines an interoperable international standard for persistent and global-scale datastores optimized for high-speed access and visualization of terrain data, 2D and 3D objects, and moving entities with textures & characteristics. The goal of this two-year research project is to extend and advance the existing CDB standard, improve its interoperability with other related OGC standards, and develop the missing CDB-compliant software tools which enables innovative M&S applications. To achieve this goal, this project has the following three objectives: (i) using a GPU-powered cloud infrastructure to design and develop an open source software tool, called the OGC CDB Application Programming Interface (API) that empowers CDB users/producers and software developers to access and publish a 3D geospatial datastore easily; (ii) developing the necessary CDB test suite and performing empirical experiments to assess the compliance, performance and interoperability of the existing CDB standard; and (iii) advancing the current CDB standard by incorporating new generation OGC standards (e.g., CityGML, and IndoorGML). The outcomes of this project will be new information models, architectures, methodologies, and software tools that enhance the realism and efficiency in creating and accessing a 3D indoor and outdoor ""plug-and-play"" SE to advance M&S applications.