DIESIS investigation: Federate Simulation Bridges

The general idea of the proposed approach is to generate a virtual layered MS framework at run-time in order to describe systems, their statuses, their behaviour, and their mutual interactions via specific domain's simulators. Models, and related simulators, could enormously differ, both in performance and formalism. For example, to model and simulate the complex system of infrastructures it could be necessary to use a power flow simulator to simulate the behaviour of the electric power grid and to use some simulator to simulate the behaviour of the telecommunication backbone. However, the main obstruction in federating heterogeneous simulators is to discover a rather general schema (or virtual apparatus) providing the capacity to organise an effi-cient exchange of information in a clever and smoothly way.

Due to the vast amount of already existing simulators in different infrastructure domains, their maturity, and the different standards and interfaces they provide, the simple establishment of a new standard for data exchange does not seem to be possible. The coupling between the different simulators has to be intelligent in some way to provide a bridge between the different, very heterogeneous simulators. These "bridges" have to be created where physical, logical or cyber dependencies between infrastructures occur. Starting from a basic model of these dependencies, these bridges will be created at run-time to create a federated simulation between existing simulators dynamically. In order to provide this capability the bridges have to contain several functions and have to be supported by additional components, including: