Software technologies for the interoperability, reusability and adaptability of distributed simulators

Giving interoperability and reusability capabilities to distributed simulators is fundamental to the widespread use of distributed simulation. The HLA standard has introduced considerable improvements with respect to previous standards, though it suffers from shortcomings such as (1) lack of interoperability among different IEEE-compliant implementations, (2) no support to the adaptation and integration of individual federates and (3) poor reusability, which is limited to entire federates only. In this paper, we present two independent technologies that overcome such shortcomings. The first technology consists of a CORBA-HLA architecture that overcomes limitation (1), the second technology is a new development framework called SimJ that overcomes limitations (2) and (3). The CORBA-HLA architecture decouples federates from the specific HLA implementation so that federates can be effortlessly run on top of any HLA implementation that exposes services through an IEEE-complaint IDL interface. The SimJ framework eases the development of individual federates by providing a uniform and standard interface for local and distributed simulators, and makes it possible the reuse of components smaller than entire federates in both local and distributed simulators.