Advancing the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) CDB Standard for 3D Synthetic Environment Simulation and Modelling

随着图形处理器(GPU)和云计算的快速发展，三维建模与仿真(M&S)变得越来越容易。3D M&S正在迅速进入航空、军事、应急响应、医疗保健、城市规划和教育等广泛的使用案例。M&S的应用程序需要一个统一的3D合成环境(SE)来表示世界，该环境可以共享、重用和重新调整用途，同时满足高性能和一致性的要求。然而，大多数M&S应用程序仍然需要其专有的和特定于应用程序的SE数据存储，这是不能互操作的。为了创建一个通用的SE数据库，表示可以被多个M&S应用重用的3D世界，开放地理空间联盟(OGC)于2017年发布了CDB标准。OGC CDB标准为持久性和全球规模的数据存储定义了一个可互操作的国际标准，该标准针对地形数据、2D和3D对象以及具有纹理和特征的移动实体的高速访问和可视化进行了优化。这项为期两年的研究项目的目标是扩展和提升现有的国开行标准，提高其与其他相关OGC标准的互操作性，并开发缺失的国开行兼容软件工具，以支持M&S的创新应用。为了实现这一目标，该项目有以下三个目标：(I)使用基于GPU的云基础设施来设计和开发一个名为OGC CDB应用编程接口(API)的开源软件工具，使CDB用户/生产者和软件开发人员能够轻松访问和发布3D地理空间数据存储；(Ii)开发必要的CDB测试套件并进行实证实验，以评估现有CDB标准的合规性、性能和互操作性；以及(Iii)通过纳入新一代OGC标准(如CityGML和InDoor GML)来推进当前CDB标准。该项目的成果将是新的信息模型、架构、方法和软件工具，以增强创建和访问3D室内和室外“即插即用”SE的真实感和效率，以推进M&S的应用。

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.