Agent-based architecture for modeling and simulation integration

The Department of Defense (DOD) has an extensive family of models used to digitally simulate the mission level interactions of weapon systems. Interoperability and reuse of the underlying data files used to create simulation scenarios are of particular interest to the modeling community. We develop an architecture to support simulation interoperability by combining three key technologies: object-oriented data modeling, an underlying persistence mechanism, and an agent-oriented analysis and design methodology. We use object-oriented modeling techniques to encapsulate and organize the syntactic information contained in scenario database files while we examine the semantic information of these objects for data integration purposes. The agent architecture provides a communication capability to support collaborative development and information brokering. We demonstrate our architecture by means of prototypical applications that implement the foundational information agent layer.