Modeling and simulation in collaborative environment: The modeling & simulation studio

Historically, modeling of architectures has been achieved by using different tools and employing different methodologies. A significant amount of processing was either manual or semi-automated. Execution of architectures was limited or very difficult to setup and run reliably. However difficult these legacy architectures were to generate, they still provide a fair amount of information. The problem that arises is how to best utilize these legacy architectures in conjunction with the new development. For the architect, collaboration between new and legacy applications is vital. One cannot willfully ignore or disregard the utility of these legacy designs or the effort of the developers. Expand has identified three distinct areas of collaboration any new tool must address: methodology, functionality and data. In this paper we will use our new tool, (which is undergoing development), to present our solution to modeling and simulating architectures in collaborative environment while addressing these three key areas. We will make comparison with other tools and introduce lessons learned from our commercially available predecessor tool - Visual Simulation Objects-VSO.