Easing the development of HLA Federates: the HLA Development Kit and its exploitation in the SEE Project

The Modeling & Simulation (M&S) of modern cyber-physical systems is presenting new challenges. New M&S techniques, methods and tools are emerging that take advantage of distributed simulation environments. One of the most mature and popular standard for distributed simulation is the IEEE1516-2010 - High Level Architecture (HLA) that, althoughoriginally developed for military applications, is increasingly exploited in a great variety of application domains due to itscapabilities to enable the interoperability and reusability of distributed simulation components. However, the development offully fledged simulation models, based on the IEEE 1516-2010standard, is still a challenging task and requires considerabledevelopment effort that often results not only in an increase indevelopment time but also in low reliability. In this context, the paper presents a general-purpose, domain-independent framework that aims to ease the development of HLA-based simulations. Its effectiveness is exemplified in the context of the Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) project lead by NASA and which involves several U.S. and European Institutions.