Högskolan i Skövde

In the effort to provide simulation support to the future Network Based Defence (NBD)1 that are currently being applied by the Swedish Armed Forces (SwAF), the authors opinion is that simulation should be treated as any other services and use the same architectural requirements addressed in the SwAF Enterprise Architecture (FMA)2 and in subsidiary documents.

The choice so far for simulation is the High Level Architecture (HLA). During the author’s participation in ongoing work supporting NBD, questions have gradually been raised if HLA is the simulation path to walk. In the Core Enterprise Services (CES) and FMA Services IT-Kernel, core services are specified and HLA do address a lot of non-simulation specific services giving unwanted redundancy. However, the services already defined may with some enhancements deliver the same services addressed within CES and FMA Services IT-Kernel. Furthermore, HLA also comes with the Federation Development and Execution Process (FEDEP) that introduce process methodology to build HLA federations. Basically FEDEP is a software development process for distributed systems. The Next Generation HLA could be more than just a simulation standard if it utilizes the FMA ideas and avoids the green HLA elephant3.

In this paper the authors present the ongoing work, as it stands today, with Service Oriented Simulations, that is an outlook for simulation using the architectural structuring, services, components and infrastructures concepts evolving in FMA and with the Global Information Grid (GIG) Enterprise Services (GES) in mind. The focus is to identify simulation services that encapsulate the core features of simulation. Thereby reducing redundancy in methodology and service as well as enabling interoperable simulation support for the whole system lifecycle – Acquisition, Development, Training, Planning, In-the-Field decision support, System removal – within NBD, entailing that the architecture for simulation is uniform regardless of its application and giving end-users the capability to focus on what to simulate instead of how to simulate.