Application of the Analysis Federate in the Joint Advanced Distributed Simulation Joint Test Force electronic warfare phase II test

Abstract

The Analysis Federate (AF) is a general-purpose High Level Architecture (HLA) data collection, analysis and visualization tool. THe AF was designed to be composable across HLA federations that use different object model abstractions in their federation object models (FOM). This composability is provided by a conceptual framework that includes fourth-generation development tools that automate the procedures required for a federate to subscribe, publish and interpret federation data. Many of these automated procedures could not be used when the AF was applied in support of the Joint Advanced Distributed Simulation (JADS) Joint Test Force (JTF). The JADS federation did not take the mainstream HLA implementation approach; instead, they developed and implemented federation-specific policies that were necessary to provide the interoperability support that exceeded the HLA baseline. The approach they took was to include objects and interactions in the JADS FOM that were named byte streams of specified sizes. The data structure definitions that were required to decode these byte streams were not documented in the FOM. In the absence of these automation procedures, the AF was manually composed application in the JADS federation. Analysis of the manual composability procedures that were used suggests that they could have been automated if the problem was looked at from a different level of abstraction. A discussion of the application of the AF in the JADS federation and a system design for automating the composability of a federate in federations whose FOMs use named data structures is presented.