Employing Hierarchical Federation Communities in the Virtual Ship Architecture

Abstract

This paper discusses work underway to develop a framework for the use of hierarchical federation communities as a tool for distributed simulation. The Virtual Ship Project is the application driving the development of the framework. The specific problem within the Virtual Ship Project is one of having to filter unwanted data. It is expected that a hierarchical federation community structure will implicitly provide the necessary data filtering.There are two main goals in establishing hierarchical federation communities as a simulation tool. The first is in the implementation of a communication structure that provides the necessary functionality for performing simulations. The second goal is a distribution framework for autonomously distributing the components of the distributed simulation, executing the simulation and returning results. Initial frameworks for these two goals are presented in the paper. The paper also presents some initial work in the development of the communication framework for hierarchical federation communities.