The road to COTS-interoperability: from generic HLA-interfaces towards plug-and-play capabilities

Interoperability between commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) is a topic which has been discussed for many years without a solution. With the advent of the High Level Architecture for Modeling and Simulation (HLA) for the first time a real industry standard has been made available which promises interoperability for a wide range of simulation systems and applications. Successful attempts to integrate HLA interfaces into different simulation packages have been made in the past. However, these interfaces typically place a significant overhead on the simulation developer. Also, as often a generic HLA interface is provided, different HLA interfaces for different simulation packages are not necessarily interoperable per se, as there are different possible ways to use HLA for the same task. This article addresses these issues and discusses interoperability solutions based on and beyond of HLA. It further investigates and comments the interoperability reference solutions put forward by SISO's COTS Simulation Package Interoperability Product Development Group.