Integrating web services technology to HLA-based multidisciplinary collaborative simulation system for complex product development

Collaborative simulation is proposed as a technique to support design evaluation with higher fidelity by addressing the interacting phenomena during the development of the complex product. To facilitate distributed simulation, high level architecture (HLA) was proposed and evolved as a standard with its specification, interfaces and data model. HLA provides simulation management for distributed component- based simulation and is identified as a candidate standard for collaborative simulation. Nevertheless, bottlenecks caused by the inherent deficiency of HLA restrict the applications of HLA-based collaborative simulation. In our presented research, we try to remedy the deficiency by integrating Web services technology to HLA-based simulation systems. Web services technology is adopted as the infrastructure for heterogeneous resources wrapping while HLA is the backbone for simulation scheduling. The framework and key issues for our solution are discussed in detail and a case study is performed. The prototype system and case study demonstrate that integrating web services with HLA is feasible in supporting collaborative simulation in the internet distributed environment with heterogeneous computing platforms.