Simulation Brokering on the Semantic Web : Foundations for a Dynamic Composability Approach

Federated simulations address the need for interoperability, as well as the improvement of reuse and composability of existing simulation models. The focal goal in a federated simulation is to facilitate composable simulations by standardizing interfaces to enable at least the technical interoperability among disparate simulations. Yet, existing federated simulation infrastructures neither facilitate sound reasoning about substantive interoperability nor are dynamically extensible. Emergent web services technologies hold out the potential to significantly improve the development of interoperable, extensible, and dynamically composable federations. As such, the recent XMSF initiative urges the use of a set of Web-based technologies that can be applied within an extensible framework for next generation of modeling and simulation applications to interoperate. We discuss how the realization of multimodel and multisimulation formalisms in terms of semantic web and agent technologies may bring new vistas within XMSF to facilitate automatic runtime federate discovery, instantiation, composition, and interoperation.