Autonomous and Composable M&S System of Systems with the Simulation, Experimentation, Analytics and Testing (Seat) Framework

A simulation System of Systems (SoS) comprised of various simulation systems may have dissimilar modeling paradigms. For performing autonomy research and development, various types of simulation systems need to be brought together to build a multi-domain virtual SoS wherein effects of autonomous entities/agents can be observed. While the distributed simulation community has solved the integrability challenge using standards like Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) or High Level Architecture (HLA), the model composability challenge is an open research problem. Many software/systems can now be made available as docker applications which can be readily plugged into existing simulation systems. However, the trust issues with such integration limit their usage as established systems cannot trust third party apps. This paper highlights some of the challenges with building a cloud-based simulation SoS, proposes an architecture framework using the concept of structural autonomy and leverages Modeling & Simulation as a fundamental key enabler for autonomy research.