The Combat Management System prototyping tool was developed to allow for rapid prototyping of different elements of a CMS. At the heart of the tool is the control module. This acts as the central hub into which all other components connect. Individual components register with the control module and once registered can then use the services provided by either the control module or any other module that is currently connected.

All of the modules implement a common interface and inherit connectivity capabilities from a base component class. The module developer is then free to specialise the module to provide a particular service. For example, one module may be developed as a Radar simulator whilst another module may be developed as a tactical picture compilation module. When these two modules register their services with the control module the Radar plots generated by the Radar module can be made available to the picture compilation module so that that module can form a track database. Similarly, the tactical picture compilation module can make the track database available to an HCI module which, once registered with the control module, can query the track database to for a visualisation of the current environment.

With this framework in place, the tool provides the capability to evaluate various aspects of a CMS by, for example, using multiple picture compilation modules each employing different algorithms.

The prototyping tool is written in Java and makes extensive use of the Remote Method Invocation (RMI) API.