Jon Watkins / Selected Staff
Founder / Owner
Jon Watkins is the Founder and Owner of Dignitas Technologies, which focuses on support for modeling and simulation across the Live, Virtual and Constructive domains. Mr. Watkins has been in the modeling and simulation industry since 1990. He started his M&S experience by deciphering the SIMNET TDB format for a PC-based research CGF (on MS-DOS!). While he has worked in many disciplines within M&S, he has a particular interest in computer generated forces (CGF) applications, virtual simulation, terrain reasoning, and terrain databases.
He has either directly participated in, or has had some influence on, many of the major Army CGF terrain formats since SIMNET TDB, including CCTT’s run-time terrain database formats (e.g. MrTDB), WARSIM’s database format, OneSAF’s OTF, and ModSAF/OTB’s CTDB. Prior to his forming Dignitas Technologies he was the development lead of the CCTT terrain team starting in 1993 and has continued to support CCTT in various capacities since then, including recent activities to add new features (dunes, insurgent buildings) and to replace the original SNE implementation with OneSAF’s ERC. As part of SE Core A&I, he is helping to integrate OneSAF into CCTT and AVCATT. As part of this work, he has helped drive many of the recent changes in the OneSAF Terrain Format (OTF) as needed to support virtual applications.
In addition to his extensive Synthetic Natural Environments experience, Mr. Watkins has a broad Computer Generated Forces experience base, having touched most aspects of CGFs over the last two decades. As an example area of focus within CGFs, Mr. Watkins was one of the key developers of CCTT SAF’s movement control and path planning algorithms. In recent efforts to update OneSAF’s movement control algorithms, Mr. Watkins provided senior design and test guidance in this area. Besides CCTT, he has played a role in many programs, including proposals, software development, technical leadership, and as-needed support.
As owner of Dignitas Technologies, Mr. Watkins has gained a wide range of business experience, ranging from DCAA compliance through to being a Facility Security Officer.
Mr. Watkins has authored, co-authored, and/or reviewed many white papers, technical reports, proposals, etc., and has authored or co-authored 10 conference papers (see bibliography).
Currently, Mr. Watkins spends the majority of his technical time on SE Core A&I, supporting the use of OneSAF / ERC in virtual simulations. Mr. Watkins has supports all of Dignitas’ SBIRs.
Publications
1) Karr, Clark and Watkins, Jon. (1993) “Using Distributed Interactive Simulation in Computer Generated Forces to Evaluate and Refine New Weapon Systems.” Proceedings of the 1993 Summer Computer Simulation Conference. Boston, MA, July 22-23, 1993 (pp 852-857)
2) Watkins, Jon and Provost, Micheline. (1994) “Design of the Terrain Reasoning Database for CCTT,” Proceedings of the 5th Conference on AI, Simulation, and Planning in High Autonomy Systems. Gainesville, FL, December 7-9, 1994 (pp 62-68).
3) Watkins, Jon (1995) “Terrain Capabilities in CCTT,” Proceedings of the 5th Conference on CGF and Behavioral Representation. Orlando, FL, May 9-11, 1995 (pp 411-419).
4) Stevens, Clark, et al. (2001) “A Common Runtime Format for Virtual and Constructive Simulations,” Spring Simulation Interoperability Workshop. Orlando, FL March 25-30, 2001.
5) Donovan, Ken, Stump, Keith, Watkins, Jon. (2001) “Virtual Database Experience with SEDRIS,” Fall Simulation Interoperability Workshop. Orlando, FL. September 9-14, 2001.
6) Campos, Jesse, Watkins, Jon. (2001) “Consuming SEDRIS Transmittals – A Pragmatic Approach,” Fall Simulation Interoperability Workshop. Orlando, FL. September 9-14, 2001.
7) Stevens, Clark, et al. (2001) “Data Modeling Implications for a Data Driven Environment Software Sub-System,” Fall Simulation Interoperability Workshop. Orlando, FL. September 9-14, 2001.
8) Vaquerizo, Sandra; Watkins, Jon (2005) “Utilizing Material-Encoded Textures for CGF,” Spring Simulation Interoperability Worksop. Orlando, FL 2005.
9) Hughley, Peggy; Watkins, Jon; Moerk, Jim; Rodio, Susan; (2006) “Integration of OneSAF Objective System into Existing Virtual Programs,” I/ITSEC, Orlando, FL Nov 2006
10) Dukstein, Greg; Watkins, Jon; Deakins, Richard; (2007) “Integration of the OneSAF Environment Runtime Component into Existing Virtual Simulations,” I/ITSEC, Orlando, FL Nov 2007.