Abstract modeling for engineering and engagement level simulations

Today´s industrial and defense communities are increasingly reliant on the use of simulation to reduce cost. At times, however, these simulations themselves have resulted in a waste of both time and money with regard to future simulation development. Current trends address this problem by promoting the development of simulation infrastructures that are scalable, portable, and interoperable over a variety of paradigms. These infrastructures, such as HLA and SPEEDES, address cost issues by providing simulation infrastructures that promote model reuse by managing model interactions across diverse paradigms, improving scenario development, and allowing for a scalable distributed simulation capability. While these modern simulation infrastructures address many cost-related issues, they do not fully address issues related to model reuse. Simulations that utilize model reuse may result in large complex system models comprised of a diverse set of subsystem component models covering varying amounts of detail and fidelity. Often, a complex simulation that reuses high fidelity subcomponent models may result in a more detailed system model than the simulation objective requires. Simulating such a system model results in a waste of simulation time with respect to addressing the simulation goals. These simulation costs, however, can be reduced through the use of abstract modeling techniques. Key issues in the abstraction process involve identifying the variables or parameters than can be abstracted away for a given simulation objective and applying the proper abstraction technique to replace those parameters. The paper presents approaches for both identifying and replacing these candidate variables