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en-USwww.sname.org/sname/mt en-US en-US en-USJuly 2012 Passengers assembled at a des ignated muster station. The concept of the virtual aircraft car -rier began in the mid-1990s as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) simu -lation-based design (SBD) Program. The concept of applying modeling and simula -tion (M&S) technologies across the entire lifecycle of any ship has matured and expanded into a core activity in shipbuild -ing at Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS). Today the United States Navy and NNS, in a government-industry team, are using M&S for CVN 78 Ford class design validation, and test and evaluation. e virtual carrier has its roots in two DARPA programs, SBD and synthetic theater of war (STOW). e SBD program focused on the concept of using computer- aided design (CAD) and manufacturing tools to create virtual prototypes con -taining product and meta data that could be used across the product lifecycle. NNS coined the term ?smart product model? to describe this capability during the SBD program. e STOW program focused on the development of a high-delity, seam -less synthetic battlespace for training, mission rehearsal, analysis, acquisition, and doctrine development. The STOW program developed discrete authoritative models of forces and sensors; a dynamic interactive environment; a scaleable and composable architecture; 3D visualiza -tion; advanced distributed simulation over high speed networks; C4I interfaces; and compliance with the Department of Defense high-level architecture (HLA). At the completion of the SBD program around 1997, the Oce of Naval Research (ONR) initiated a program that sought to integrate the concepts of an SBD ship virtual prototype and a live, virtual, con -structive synthetic battlespace into an environment that could address acquisi -tion needs for aviation-ship integration. e program was called warghting con -cepts to future weapon system designs (WARCON). During WARCON, NNS and the navy began a government-indus -try partnership. As part of the WARCON An implementation of the virtual warship reference architecture. e primary lesson learned in development of the virtual carrier was that most commercial M&S tools that NNS used in the manufacturing world did not support the interoperability needed.