Predictive-conservative synchronization for commercial simulation package interoperability

Distributed simulation is desired in many industries to support analysis and decision making for complex and integrated problems. Interoperating commercial simulation packages using the high level architecture (HLA) is a technique to fulfill this demand. Time management is an important factor in determining the execution performance when using this technique. In some simulation models, conservative synchronization does not provide good efficiency because of the high cost of requesting a time advance with every event. In this paper, we describe a user-friendly framework for interoperating AutoMod models by adopting the HLA standard with a new time management mechanism. A ¿departure port¿ mechanism identifies the characteristics of the message outgoing process and provides a dynamic safe request time to invoke the time advancing service. We conducted experiments using close-to-reality models which show that the execution time can be reduced by over 50%.