Avoiding another Green Elephant - A Proposal for the Next Generation HLA based on the Model Driven Architecture

Abstract: When looking through the proceedings of the recent Simulation Interoperability Workshops, a lot of papers - some of them even awarded by the committee - are dealing with alternative concepts outside or beyond the High Level Architecture (HLA): Web Services, the extensible Markup Language (XML), Java Beans, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), etc. Similarly, requirements driven by interoperability issues have resulted in the need to use meta modeling, adaptive models, and common repositories. The use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a model description language is also rapidly becoming a standard. All these concepts have relations to the HLA, but they are not part of it. There seems to be the danger that HLA is overrun by respective developments of the free market and will become irrelevant finally. ... This paper introduces the MDA concept and shows, how the HLA can be integrated to become a standard stub for simulation applications of legacy systems, systems under development, and systems of the future.