Session: Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA)

Dr. Ed Powell of SAIC led this Monday tutorial on of the Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA). While TENA came into existence for the purpose of interoperability on Army and Navy test and training ranges, it appears to be en route to becoming a replacement for HLA. As with the previous session, it sped by too fast for me to get too many notes, and we weren't provided with copies of the slides, so the following notes are somewhat random.

TENA attempts to provide the best features of HLA, minus HLA's disadvantages.

One slide compared other distributed architectures to TENA: On the wire spec vs. API standard, single frame of reference vs. multiple frames of reference, single level vs. multiple levels of compliance, run time checking vs. compile time checking, hand coded interfaces vs. automatic interfaces.

TENA's latest release is 6.0 beta 1. TENA's version numbers are x.y.z, where a change x indicates a change to the API, a change in y indicates a change in wire-level interoperability, and a change in z indicates a bug fix.

The TENA development team is partnering with Joint National Training Capability (JNTC) and Joint Mission Environment Test Capability (JMETC).

TENA was used in JNTC's Joint Red Flag 2005, and in JMETC's 2006 InterTEC air combat mission event.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research uses TENA with a server that provides four-dimensional weather data (4DWX) for joint training events.

Here are a couple of papers about TENA:

DEVELOPING DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS RAPIDLY AND RELIABLY USING THE TENA MIDDLEWARE by J. Russell Noseworthy, SAIC, delivered at MILCOM 2005, October 17-20, 2005.

The Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA) Overview Briefing - 13 November 2007. This PDF appears to be the slideshow that was presented at the tutorial.

There will be a TENA course in mid-January at the Dulles Embassy Suites.