Adding the Infrastructure Class Hierarchy To the EXHORT Framework for Object-Oriented Deployment Simulations

One of the objectives of the U.S. Department of Defense is to standardize all classes used in objectoriented deployment simulations by developing a standard class attribute representation and behavior for all deployment simulations that rely on an underlying class representation. The EXtensive Hierarchy and Object Representation for Transportation Simulations (EXHORT) is a class framework composed of two hierarchies that together constitute a standard and consistent class attribute representation and behavior that could be used directly by a large set of deployment simulations. The first hierarchy, the Transportation Class Hierarchy (TCH), was submitted to the Army Modeling & Simulation Office’s (AMSO) Army Standards Repository in 1999 and presented at the Fall Simulation Interoperability Workshop in the same year. The second hierarchy, the Infrastructure Class Hierarchy (ICH), describes the encapsulation of the rest of the defense transportation system and is the primary focus of this paper. The entire EXHORT framework lets deployment simulations use the same set of underlying class data, ensures transparent exchanges, reduces the effort needed to integrate simulations, and permits a detailed analysis of the defense transportation system.