A PROPOSED STANDARD FOR ACHIEVING SIMULATION MODEL REUSABILITY & INTEROPERABILITY

Abstract

Simulation interoperability is an essential objective that is widely recognised within the Modeling & Simulation (M&S) community. Today, we see the use of High Level Architecture (HLA) to realise interoperability at a macro level involving networked clusters of heterogeneous simulators. However, interoperability at a finer-grained level involving simulation models is still far from being achieved. We note that simulation model reusability and interoperability is limited primarily by a lack of standard approach toward M&S. Consequently, this lack of standard approach creates a gamut of semantic and syntactic compatibility issues that serve to limit model interoperability. In this thesis, we present these limiting factors from two different perspectives, namely from a theoretical M&S framework perspective and from software code portability perspective. Using a proposed unified M&S framework as our basis, we then propose a standard model specification and a standard engine-model interface using state-of-the-art eXtensible Markup Language (XML). With these two proposed standards, we then propose a modeling development framework that serves to achieve simulation model reusability and interoperability by resolving the set of syntactic incompatibilities among simulation models. In addition, the proposed standard model specification also presents a way to resolve some of the semantic incompatibility issues.