Guidelines for commercial off-the-shelf Simulation Package interoperability

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used visual interactive modeling environments such as Arena¿, Anylogic¿, Flexsim¿, Simul8¿, Witness¿, etc. CSP Interoperability (or distributed simulation) is a technique that allows a simulation to be executed over several computers or for several simulations running on different computers to run together. This also relates to simulation languages such as SLX¿ and GPSS/H¿. There have been various attempts to interoperate these CSPs, some with the IEEE 1516 high level architecture (HLA). These can be quite complex and it is easy to loose track of exactly what is occurring between interoperating CSPs and their models. This paper introduces a set of interoperability reference models (IRMs), or design patters for CSP Interoperability, that can be used as guidelines to simplify the interoperability process.