Distributed collaborative environments for 21st century modeling and simulation

Distributed collaboration is an emerging technology that will significantly change how modeling and simulation is employed in 21st century organizations. Modeling and simulation (M&S) is already an integral part of how many organizations conduct business and, in the future, will continue to spread throughout government and industry enterprises and across many domains from research and development to logistics to training to operations. This paper reviews research that is focusing on the open standards agent-based framework, product and process modeling, structural architecture, and the integration technologies - the glue to integrate the software components. A distributed collaborative environment is the underlying infrastructure that makes communication between diverse simulations and other assets possible and manages the overall flow of a simulation based experiment. The AFRL Collaborative Environment concept will foster a major cultural change in how the acquisition, training, and operational communities employ M&S.