Execution Logging and Replay: Issues and Approaches

Logging and replay of federation execution data are clearly useful for a number of purposes including after action review, demonstrations, analysis, and debugging. The advent of the HLA and its RTI, while clearly affording substantial payoffs in terms of abstraction, interoperability, and reuse, have a number of implications for simulation system architectures, Federate application software, Federation logger/replayer software, database formats/capabilities, and communication and processing resources. Since the HLA/RTI represents a significant paradigm change for logging/replaying DIS-style as well as other simulations, these implications need to be considered carefully. In addition to exploring these implications, this paper examines capabilities of the current HLA Interface Specification for implementing Federation logging/replay applications.