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Abstract

Interoperation and dynamic composability of disparate simulations is a long-standing challenge within the defense modeling and simulation community. While both issues are extensively studied, a unified and coherent strategy that facilitates achieving seamless and transparent congruity among conceptual and realization spaces of simulations is still an elusive goal. In this paper, an agent-supported meta-level interoperation architecture is proposed to address these challenges. The strategy involves the introduction of an agent framework independent of the simulation infrastructure for explicit separation of interoperation protocols from the simulation environment. To this end, agent-based mediation, brokering, matchmaking, and facilitation services are suggested as critical components for interoperation and composability. The proposed approach is based on the following premises: 1) deployment of brokering protocols improves transparency and balances the workload in interoperation, 2) partial matchmaking mechanisms provide more efficient and effective model and data qualification strategies than the conventional keyword-based matching mechanism, and 3) automated mediation facilities that are deployed independently from the simulation infrastructure improve transparency and runtime extensibility. Stand-alone prototypes of the matchmaker and broker agents are developed to facilitate testing these propositions. We conclude by discussing the extension of the applicability of the proposed strategy to DoDAF architectural views and associated products.

Keywords

Interoperability composability intelligent agents mediation meta-simulation

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Toward a Meta-Level Framework for Agent-Supported Interoperation of Defense Simulations

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