Högskolan i Skövde

In the effort to provide simulation support to the future Network Based Defence (NBD) that are currently being applied by the Swedish Armed Forces (SwAF), and the similair work within US and NATO, the authors opinion is that simulation should be treated as any other services, existing in the operational systems. Meaning that architecture should be conformant between the operational and simulated systems, for a start use the same infrastructure. 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 Swedish Armed Force Enterprise Architecture (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 FMA Services ITKernel. The Next Generation HLA could be more than just a simulation standard if it utilizes the FMA ideas. 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 Global Information Grid (GIG). The focus of the work is to enable 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.