Syntactic and Semantic Model Composability based on BOMs

Composability in Modeling and Simulation community which can be defined as the capability to select and assemble a simulation model out of predefined simulation models or components is an important challenge due to the cost and time spent on developing a simulation model. Base Object Model, BOM, is a new standard for developing simulation components and making reusability and composability of components possible. BOM is used in HLA which is the most widely used distributed simulation architecture. HLA provides standards for specifying simulation parts via Simulation Object Models (SOMs) and interactions between simulation parts via Federation Object Models (FOMs). The main problem with SOM and FOM is that they lack semantic information about what they intend to simulate. Introducing of BOM was a respond to this smentic information lacking. However, BOMs also do not contain sufficient information for defining concepts and terms in order to avoid ambiguity. We have investigated how to improve the composability of BOM by introducing a semantic attachment. The semantic attachment enriched BOM parts with meta-data in form of Web Ontology Language (OWL). The semantic attachment includes ontologies for entities, events and interactions in each component. OWLS upper ontology is suggested in order to describe actions of BOM in OWL. A three layer model composability approach has been proposed in order to utilize the semantic attachment data to verify composability of components. The three layer model consists of syntactic, static semantic and dynamic semantic layers utilizing a set of rules for reasoning about composition. Moreover, a formula for calculating the composability degree of a composition is proposed. Finally, in order to verify the correctness of the approach, a case study is tested with an implementation of the approach using Java and Java Expert System Shell (JESS).