Building an HLA-Based Distributed Simulation: A Metadata Approach

Building complex simulations is usually a challenge, mainly due to the broad spectrum of concepts that must be taken into account. Simulation middleware based on the IEEE 1516 standard tries to reduce this complexity, but there are still aspects that hinder the implementation of such simulations. The dependency between the source code and the corresponding formal description of the model could be hard to verify and maintain. Also, the code for the model simulation and the code needed for the integration with the HLA/RTI middleware coexist becoming complex and error prone. In this paper we propose a new framework based on metadata (Java annotations or C# attributes) that faces these problems and extends the IEEE 1516-2010 standard. In addition, we present an implementation of the IEEE 1516 standard in the C# language. Finally, we explain our experience in implementing the standard in C#.