Innovative System Modeling Methods and Tools

WarpIV Technologies, Inc. proposes to demonstrate the WarpIV Kernel parallel discrete-event simulation engine and its extensive collection of software tools to address the cross-cutting modeling needs of the NASA integrated science mission modeling community.The WarpIV Kernel is a layered open-system architecture where each layer in the architecture is permitted to utilize (i.e., depend on) services from lower layers, but not the upper layers. With this hierarchical dependency structure, the architecture layers can be thought of as composable libraries that are ready for standardization by the international Modeling amp; Simulation (Mamp;S) community. Any technology layer could be swapped out and replaced with a different (perhaps optimized for a particular hardware/network configuration) implementation developed by any other organization. The plug-and-play composability design strategy of the WarpIV Kernel promotes composability both for (1) technology insertion and (2) composable plug-and-play software models potentially developed by multiple geographically distributed organizations to facilitate collaboration. The software abstractions and overall composability methodology support both arbitrary and mixed levels of fidelity for systems and subsystems hierarchically composed of models.Support for plug-and-play model composability within the WarpIV Kernel simulation engine is essentially complete and could be used by NASA today to support MBSE. However, the set of tools used to (a) construct models and (b) specify their composite structure needs to support MBSE standards such as SysML. The model data, interface, and system-structure metadata that is captured by the WarpIV GUI tools have not yet been translated to SysML format and vice versa, so this step needs to first be evaluated for feasibility and then demonstrated with initial capabilities. This effort will also demonstrate a conceptual spacecraft mission executing with a set of simple composable models in parallel.