System Engineering and Integration Aspects of a Multi-National HLA Federation Development

The NATO/PfP Interoperability and Re-use Study, NIREUS, is a twelve-nation project to apply the High Level Architecture (HLA) to investigate multinational distributed simulation for system design and acquisition. The NIREUS test case concerns distributed simulation of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) air vehicles landing on ships, initially focusing on Maritime Unmanned Air Vehicles (MUAVs) but also addressing conventional manned aircraft. This problem incorporates daunting physics and military operations issues, which are dependent on understanding system interoperability between the ship, air vehicle, air vehicle control, and the landing system. Sufficient understanding of interoperability early in the system design process can be leveraged to optimize the ship/aircraft design in consideration of landing operations. The results of this experience-based study will be applied to the realm of Simulation Based Design and Virtual Prototyping, potentially leading to NATO-wide standards. This is an engineering-level federation development that involves federate developers from six different countries, where the majority of the federates are themselves being built by multi-national partnerships. The federation contains both new federates and legacy codes with new HLA interfaces, and will be a working federation in September 2001. Design for re-use is paramount. The work involves subject matter experts on physics-based models from the three domains of ships, air vehicles, and landing systems. Also mixed in are a group of simulation technology experts. FEDEP execution has been interesting and challenging in this multi-national and cross-domain environment. This paper discusses the various system engineering and integration aspects encountered thus far during NIREUS development, including: team formation, conceptual modeling, FOM production, and integration planning.