Hierarchical federations: an architecture for information hiding

Abstract

In a distributed simulation, simulation components of various types are executed at geographically different locations, forming a simulation federation to create a common virtual environment. Under the High Level Architecture (HLA), information that will be produced and consumed by a simulation component is defined in its object model, and how that information is produced and consumed is well encapsulated inside the simulation component's implementation. However, in the current implementation of the HLA's Runtime Infrastructure (RTI), information hiding between groups of simulation components in a simulation federation is not addressed. In this paper, we discuss how hierarchical federations architectures can be used to tackle this problem. The hierarchical federations architecture adopted in this paper differs from the existing architectures in that it is based on a hybrid approach for inter-operability between simulation federations. To demonstrate the information hiding using the architecture, a distributed semiconductor supply-chain simulation is also described in the paper.