Improving the Verification of Synthetic Environments: A Three-pronged Approach to Early-stage Interoperability Checking of HLA Federations

摘要

This paper reports on a recently concluded research project, at the Royal Military College of Science (RMCS), which was concerned with improving the early-stage verification of Synthetic Environments (SEs) by applying automated checks to the Simulation Object Models (SOMs) and Federation Object Models (FOMs) of SEs developed with the High Level Architecture (HLA). The starting point for this project has been the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) Object Model Template (OMT) Test Procedures, which specify Consistency Checks to verify that an individual FOM or SOM is well-formed. An earlier paper (99S-SIW-171) reported research that refined and validated these consistency checks, and implemented them in our RMCS HLA Checker Toolset. A subsequent paper (OOS-SIW- 076) reported the formalisation of the OMT and the Consistency Checks using Relational Algebra, as well as the formulation of Compositional Checks that detect inconsistencies between the federates that define a HLA federation. These Compositional Checks have been implemented in the RMCS HLA Checker Toolset, and applied to a set of published FOMs and SOMs, revealing numerous data inconsistencies that could have resulted in interoperability problems between federates. In this latest paper, we take a retrospective look at our research, and report the findings of our pilot investigation into Semantic Checks that can be applied to FOMs and SOMs, in order to detect some of the substantial interoperability problems reported by Dahmann et al at the Fall 1999 SIW. Finally, we offer a possible application of the results and insights derived from this HLA-based research to the early-stage verification of the interoperability of other component-based approaches, such as that provided by the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).