DoD High Level Architecture

The High Level Architecture (HLA) developed by the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) is addressing the continuing need for interoperability among new and existing simulations within the U. S. Department of Defense. In September 1996 the HLA was approved as the standard reference architecture for modeling and simulation in the DoD, and it has been mandated that all DoD simulations must become HLA compliant. The HLA consist of three components: 1) a set of rules that govern certain characteristics of HLA-compliant simulations, 2) an object modeling template that describes the information of common interest to a group (called a federation) of cooperating federates, and 3) an interface specification to a Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) that provides the software environment needed by the federates to exchange information in a coordinated fashion. The RTI can be viewed as a distributed operating system providing services to support interoperable simulations executing in distributed computing environments.