Research On The Interoperability Between Arena And HLA/RTI And Its Application

In recent years, with the development of Internet technology and the scale of simulation system continues to expand, distributed simulation framework is becoming the mainstream of the field of simulation. At present, the international standard of distributed simulation is HLA 1516, which comes for the need of reusability and interoperability of simulation components and provides a common framework to integrate heterogeneous simulation models over computer networks so that they work together during a simulation run.However, it is complex and prone to error to develop a HLA-based model using ordinary high-level languages (primarily C++ or Java). On the other hand, the basic standard for the interoperability between Commercial-off-the-shelf Simulation Packages (CSPs) and HLA has been presented, that is Interoperability Reference Models (IRMs). So it is meaningful to study how to use popular CSPs to develop HLA complicant models, which is the extension of CSPs with HLA capabilities. Arena is one of the most popular CSPs which can be used to develop centralized simulation model rapidly. However, until now there is no in-depth research on adapting Arena into HLA home and aboard. This paper focuses on this and develops a general approach to connect Arena with HLA/RTI. Our goal is to integrate Arena with HLA on the level of Type I Interoperability Reference Model (IRM I).Key works of this paper can be summarized in the following four parts:(1) Based on the IRM I, a general approach connecting Arena and HLA is proposed. By the comparison of the execution flow of an Arena model in Real-time mode with that of a HLA federate, we extract eight issues must be done before achieving the goal firstly, and then solve them one by one. The key step is to make an Arena model HLA compliant by adding some code in related VBA events.(2) A general program to express and transmit entity is designed. The entity is expressed by mapping the entity attributes to the parameters of interaction class in HLA and transmitted among federates through sending & resceiving interaction class instance.(3) A general program to advance simulation time synchronously is designed. Through associating the internal time of Arena model with its RTI time as a federate, combination the related VBA events and HLA services, we can make all Arena federates to advance their simulation time synchronously. (4) A general adaptor architecture is presented. This adaptor is designed to simplify the commulications between Arena model and HLA/RTI.In the end, an experiment is implemented to validate the correctness of the proposed approach and we show the whole process to develop a HLA-based container terminal logistic system federation using the approach this paper presented. The result shows that our approach is correct on both entity information transmission and time synchronization, and can improve the efficiency and accuracy of developing HLA simulation federation greatly.