Composing executable architectures from legacy simulations

Summary form only given. Visual simulation objects (VSO) is a collaborative architecture specification, design and execution toolkit that assists analysts in rapidly prototyping system designs and evaluating their dynamic performance. VSO uses a graphical simulation language to describe objects and their interactions. It can be used both for individual applications and in a collaborative development environment. VSO can translate architectures developed in a variety of languages, such as system architect, to VSO's format and execute them in a distributed environment using a built-in HLA interface. We demonstrate how two teams, initially working independently, can collaborate to build and execute a complex architecture and extract performance information from it. The first team translates an air operations center (AOC) model developed in system architect to VSO's format and executes it to determine its dynamic properties. The second team develops an executable architecture of time critical targeting (TCT), a U.S. Air Force war fighting function, in VSO. Working collaboratively, the two teams integrate their architectures in VSO via an HLA/RTI. The integrated architecture describes multiple simultaneously-executing target acquisitions, each of which sends a detection message to the AOC, and can be used to examine how AOC resources can be allocated to meet the targeting requests