Composing executable architectures from legacy simulations

Summary form only given. Visual simulation objects (VSO) is a collaborative architecture specification, design and execution toolkit that assists analysts in rapidly prototyping system designs and evaluating their dynamic performance. VSO uses a graphical simulation language to describe objects and their interactions. It can be used both for individual applications and in a collaborative development environment. VSO can translate architectures developed in a variety of languages, such as system architect, to VSO´s format and execute them in a distributed environment using a built-in HLA interface. We demonstrate how two teams, initially working independently, can collaborate to build and execute a complex architecture and extract performance information from it. The first team translates an air operations center (AOC) model developed in system architect to VSO´s format and executes it to determine its dynamic properties. The second team develops an executable architecture of time critical targeting (TCT), a U.S. Air Force war fighting function, in VSO. Working collaboratively, the two teams integrate their architectures in VSO via an HLA/RTI. The integrated architecture describes multiple simultaneously-executing target acquisitions, each of which sends a detection message to the AOC, and can be used to examine how AOC resources can be allocated to meet the targeting requests