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M&S Standards by Dr. Frederick Kuhl For a software architecture to achieve success, it's not enough that the architecture be useful and technically coherent - particularly these days, when, for any problem you name, there are a dozen answers competing for attention. For an architecture to be successful in the current environment, it must be widely used and broadly supported with products. Prospective users must know the architecture exists and must be convinced, not only that implementations are available, but that their long-term commitment to the architecture will be matched by commitments from suppliers of implementations. Public standards play a key role here. An architecture accepted as a standard is a level playing field on which vendors compete on the merits of their implementations. A standard architecture is seen by users as a reliable base for their work. The DoD's High-Level Architecture (HLA) for modeling and simulation is one such architecture. The HLA enjoys a mandate for its use inside the DoD, but that doesn't compel its broader acceptance across the range of industries that employ modeling and simulation. Nor does it ensure broad availability of infrastructure and tools to support the HLA. Accordingly, the HLA's DoD sponsor, DMSO, is pursuing public standardization of the HLA along three paths. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world's premier professional society for electrical and software engineering. IEEE standards affect engineering practice around the globe. Three draft standards covering the entire HLA are being developed by the HLA Working Group of the IEEE Computer Society under the sponsorship of the computer society's Simulation Interoperability Standards Committee. The HLA working group, chaired by MITRE Networking and Communications Lead Susan Symington, plans to achieve standardization of the three drafts by October 1, 1999. The Object Management Group (OMG) is an industry consortium for the development standards for distributed object computing. The 850 members of the OMG comprise the major software vendors and users from a wide variety of domains. OMG created the CORBA standard and remains the leading force for open standards for distributed computing. MITRE Senior Principal Staff Dr. Frederick Kuhl is DMSO's technical representative to the OMG. He also chairs OMG's Simulation Special Interest Group. DMSO is bringing the software component of the HLA to OMG as a proposed standard. That standard is on track for adoption in 1998. The Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) was formed by representatives of government and industry modeling and simulation activities. SISO aims at standards across the range of simulation design and practice. SISO also provides a forum for the discussion of practical simulation matters in its bi-annual Simulation Interoperability Workshops. The SISO membership elected MITRE Group Leader Laura Feinerman to chair the standards portion of SISO, the Standards Activity Committee, and MITRE Lead Technical Staff Dave Prochnow to chair the Logistics forum. SISO is working through the IEEE to standardize the main elements of the HLA. For more information, please contact Frederick Kuhl using the employee directory. |
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