Expanding the Reach of Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) to Service-Based Modeling and Simulation Environments

摘要

Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) is used extensively in Department of Defense (DoD) modeling and simulation environments, and in many real-time platform-level wargaming communities, it is the standard for simulation interoperability. Though DIS has gained wide acceptance in the military community, it has a fairly steep learning curve for those accustomed to other non-military simulation environments. Many of the simulation tools used in the civilian research community can share information through software service calls. However, they are typically not designed to integrate into larger scale simulation architectures based on industry standards, such as DIS. This paper will discuss research and development of a software framework, referred to as DIS for Heterogeneous Modeling and Simulation Environment (DISH-ME), which bridges the gap between the large world of DIS-compliant simulations and those not designed for DIS. DISH-ME accomplishes this with a service-based framework between DIS-based simulations and service-based consumers. In addition, DISH-ME leverages DIS-XML, an offshoot of the Extensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF) initiative, to store and transmit data into a format that can be easily parsed and interpreted. While DISH-ME has shown some early success, there are still significant challenges to be overcome for it to reach its full potential, and this paper will address those issues as well.