A Topic-Based Data Distribution Management for HLA

Modeling and Simulation (M&S) represents a fundamental technology for designing and studying complex systems in various industrial and scientific domains, when real-world testing is too costly to perform in terms of safety, time, and other resources. To promote the reusability and interoperability of simulation models allowing them to interoperate without geographic constraints, distributed simulation has been introduced. One of the most widely adopted standards for distributed simulation is IEEE 1516-2010 - High Level Architecture (HLA). Among the services provided by HLA, a key one is the Data Distribution Management (DDM) that allows to reduce the transmission and reception of unnecessary data in order to improve communication effectiveness among simulation models. Although many matching algorithms have been proposed in the literature, the upcoming HLA 4.0 standard defines a DDM that still relies on performing matching verification by calculating the overlap between regions using their dimensions. In this paper, a novel topic-based publish-subscribe messaging system is proposed to improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of DDM services. Experiments show that the proposed topic-based approach achieves better performance than the standard one.