Application of Service-Oriented Architecture to Distributed Simulation

The paper describes an effort to apply Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles and technologies in a distributed simulation environment. The goal of this effort was to develop and prove concepts for using SOA to increase the flexibility and ease-of-use of a set of corporate assets that are used for analyzing future concepts for the National Airspace System (NAS). These assets include simulations, algorithms, visualization tools, and data archives. The paper provides background information on SOA principles and technology, as well as some general discussion of how SOA can be applied to distributed simulation. Performance issues that arise when using SOA technologies are discussed, and data from a set of performance experiments is presented and analyzed. The paper then describes concepts we developed and prototypes we built to demonstrate and prove these concepts. The concepts include some unique ideas for controlling simulations and managing simulation contexts by creating a simulation-aware extension to a SOA registry, as well as concepts for allowing different assets to be combined without programming.