HLA support in a discrete event simulation language

There has been a growing interest in the HLA proposal as a common framework for real-time, distributed and interactive simulations. Although most of HLA compliant federates are for the moment developed with general purpose languages, the development of HLA federates with an existing simulation language would enable the rapid porting of a large number of existing simulations into the HLA framework. The difficulties of supporting the HLA features in a discrete event simulation language come from the different way the two approaches manage the simulation time and the interactions between objects in the simulation. This paper addresses these problems and uses the PARSEC discrete event simulation language as a test case.