Automated Interoperability Testing System

The advent of the High Level Architecture (HLA) increased the complexity, time, and expense of performing simulation network integration as compared to the previous DIS standard. While DIS was a simple, fixed data protocol running on top of IP/UDP, HLAhas many additional complexities, including the Runtime Infrastructure (RTI) and API, unlimited Federation Object Model (FOM) structures, and indeterminate low-level networking configurations. All these new variables have provided additional flexibilityin the range of simulation types that HLA can be applied to, however, it has drastically increased the opportunity for network configuration errors, RTI compatibility errors, FOM construction errors, data definition errors, and interaction logic errors.This has drastically increased the amount of time and effort it takes to correctly integrate a new federate into an HLA federation. The need for robust, commercial HLA testing tools is critical. MA,K is proposing a two-prong approach to providingcommercial products for HLA testing. MA,K will develop the FOMspy federation analysis tool, and will augment the commercially selling RTIspy product with additional required RTI debugging features. Prototypes will be developed in Phase I for evaluation,and complete implementation of the FOMspy will take place in Phase II. We propose the development of the FOMspy product based on the visual programming paradigm and existing VR-Forces GUI infrastructure. FOMspy would read in the Object Model Template(OMT) file, and the most logical tests would be automatically constructed based on the OMT entries. The user would be provided with two mechanisms for adding custom tests: visual programming through the GUI, and custom programming via a C++ developer¿_Tstoolkit for any new state variables, test conditions, etc. The benefits of the FOMspy are (1) HLA developers would be provided with a great deal of sensible testing capability right out of the box, with the automatic OMT test construction, (2) developerswould be able to generate new tests with the GUI programming environment, which can reduce programming errors, (3) the developer¿_Ts API toolkit can provide unlimited extensibility for new tests not represented in the GUI, and (4) by outputting the resultsto a standard statistical analysis package, all the power of those commercially available tools can be applied to processing the data.