Practical insights into the process of extending a federation-a review of the High Level Architecture Command and Control Experiment

The High Level Architecture (HLA) Command and Control (C2) Experiment was a Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) funded effort to evaluate the efficacy of the Modular Reconfigurable C4I Interface (MRCI) in the context of HLA-compliant modeling and simulation. The HLA C2 Experiment was a coordinated effort of HLA technology exploration and MRCI development. The experiment focused on three primary investigations: (1) the inclusion of real-world C2 entities as federates in an existing HLA federation; (2) the extendibility and reuse of an HLA federation, and (3) the accuracy of the federation development and execution process (FEDEP) as a guide for federation design and development. The HLA C2 team crafted and used the experiment requirements, flow and influence process as a visualization of the processes used for defining and designing the experiment and for identifying the relationships among these processes. This paper presents how the sponsor's needs and objectives were carried forward in and influenced the design of the HLA C2 federation system within the experiment. It also demonstrates the relationships and influences each experiment phase had on the flow of activities, beginning with the identification of the customer needs, through to the finalization of the system and study/experiment designs. It focuses on the key HLA C2 Experiment's federation design and integration aspects and reports the investigations' associated insights/lessons learned.