Developing architectures in a collaborative environment

The representation and evaluation of operations and systems are currently limited to those cases for which a small group, working closely and communicating directly, can develop an executable architecture. However, in the near future many commercial and academic entities, as well as the department of defense, will require large-scale architectures. The development of these architectures will require larger teams, often working remotely and communicating infrequently. A methodology for sharing architecture components that preserves their proprietary content has been developed and integrated into visual simulation objects (VSO). This demonstration will show how the components of an architecture can be shared by integration teams and integrated into larger architectures. The owner of an individual entity may expose the details of its design by providing selected users with a password for read-only or read-write access to its low-level structure. Users who do not have access may still incorporate the entity into an executable architecture since it retains its static and dynamic properties and behavior within an architecture.