Towards a Formal Theory of Interoperability

This dissertation proposes a formal theory of interoperability that explains 1) what interoperability is as opposed to how it works, 2) how to tell whether two or more systems can interoperate and 3) how to identify whether systems are interoperating or merely exchanging bits and bytes. The research provides a formal model of data in M&S that captures all possible representations of a real or imagined thing and distinguishes between existential dependencies and transformational dependencies. Existential dependencies capture the relationships within a model while transformational dependencies capture the relationships between interactions with a model. These definitions are used to formally specify interoperation, the ability to exchange information, as a necessary condition for interoperability. Theorems of interoperation that capture the nature and boundaries of the interoperation space and how to measure it are formulated. Interoperability is formally captured as a subset of the interoperation space for which transformational dependencies can be fulfilled. Theorems of interoperability that capture the interoperability space and how to measure it are presented. Using graph theory and complexity theory, the model of data is reformulated as a graph, and the complexity of interoperation and interoperability is shown to be at least NP-Complete. Model Based Data Engineering (MBDE) is formally defined using the model of data introduced earlier and transformed into a heuristic that supports interoperability. This heuristic is shown to be more powerful than current approaches in that it is consistent and can easily be verified

Community-of-Interest (COI) Model-Based Languages Enabling Composable Net-Centric Services

Net-centric services shall be designed to collaborate with other services used within the supported Community of Interest (COI). This requires that such services not only be integratable on the technical level and interoperable on the implementation level, but also that they are composable in the sense that they are semantically and pragmatically consistent and able to exchange information in a consistent and unambiguous way. In order to support Command-and-Control with Composable Net-centric Services, the human-machine interoperation must be supported as well as the machine-machine interoperation. This paper shows that techniques of computer linguistic can support the human-machine interface by structuring human-oriented representations into machine-oriented regular expressions that implement the unambiguous data exchange between machines. Distinguishing between these two domains is essential, as some requirements are mutually exclusive. In order to get the best of both worlds, an aligned approach based on a COI model is needed. This COI model starts with the partners and their respective services and business processes, identifies the resulting infrastructure components, and derives the information exchange requirements. Model-based Data Engineering leads to the configuration of data exchange specifications between the services in form of an artificial language comprising regular expressions for the machine-machine communication. Computer linguistic methods are applied to accept and generate human-oriented representations, which potentially extend the information exchange specifications to capture new information not represented in the system requirements. The paper presents the framework that was partially applied for homeland security applications and in support of the joint rapid scenario generation activities of US Joint Forces Command.

Ontological Implications of the Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model

The Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM) was developed to cope with the different layers of interoperation of modeling & simulation applications. It introduced technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual layers of interoperation and showed how they are related to the ideas of integratability, interoperability, and composability. This paper will be presented in the invited session Ontology Driven Interoperability for Agile Applications using Information Systems: Requirements and Applications for Agent Mediated Decision Support at WMSCI 2006

Applying the Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model in Support of Integratability, Interoperability, and Composability for System-of-Systems Engineering

The Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM) was developed to cope with the different layers of interoperation of modeling & simulation applications. It introduced technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual layers of interoperation and showed how they are related to the ideas of integratability, interoperability, and composability. The model was successfully applied in various domains of systems, cybernetics, and informatics

Minding Morality: Ethical Artificial Societies for Public Policy Modeling

Public policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in human life and central to many public policy challenges. In this paper, we supply evidence that incorporating morally salient dimensions of a culture is critically important for producing relevant and accurate evaluations of social policy when using multi-agent artificial intelligence models and simulations

Conceptual Requirements for Command and Control Languages

Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) SIW Conference PaperThe current Coalition Battle Management Language initiative (C-BML) will define a language to unambiguously exchange command and control information between systems. This paper introduces a categorization that may be used to guide the process of developing C-BML effectively by enumerating the conceptual requirements the authors have identified in model-based data engineering and process engineering based studies in various domains

A Content Analysis-Based Approach to Explore Simulation Verification and Identify Its Current Challenges

Verification is a crucial process to facilitate the identification and removal of errors within simulations. This study explores semantic changes to the concept of simulation verification over the past six decades using a data-supported, automated content analysis approach. We collect and utilize a corpus of 4,047 peer-reviewed Modeling and Simulation (M&S) publications dealing with a wide range of studies of simulation verification from 1963 to 2015. We group the selected papers by decade of publication to provide insights and explore the corpus from four perspectives: (i) the positioning of prominent concepts across the corpus as a whole; (ii) a comparison of the prominence of verification, validation, and Verification and Validation (V&V) as separate concepts; (iii) the positioning of the concepts specifically associated with verification; and (iv) an evaluation of verification\u27s defining characteristics within each decade. Our analysis reveals unique characterizations of verification in each decade. The insights gathered helped to identify and discuss three categories of verification challenges as avenues of future research, awareness, and understanding for researchers, students, and practitioners. These categories include conveying confidence and maintaining ease of use; techniques\u27 coverage abilities for handling increasing simulation complexities; and new ways to provide error feedback to model users

Conceptual Requirements for Command and Control Languages

The current Coalition Battle Management Language initiative (C-BML) will define a language to unambiguously exchange command and control information between systems. This paper introduces a categorization that may be used to guide the process of developing C-BML effectively by enumerating the conceptual requirements the authors have identified in model-based data engineering and process engineering based studies in various domains. First, it is important to distinguish if application of the language will support the planning, execution, or observation phase of command and control. While C-BML already distinguishes between tasking and reporting, planning is a category with different requirements. Second, the language must be able to express various spatio-temporal constraints, which can be expressed using fixed expressions, relative to each other, or in mixed forms. In addition to the traditional spatio-temporal constraints, operation-specific constraints – or the perception thereof – need to be expressed. Finally, it must be determined if the constraints are used in support of accomplishment-driven objectives or avoidance-driven objectives. While this category seems to be trivial to most human consumers of the language, it has significant implications for systems. The paper introduces the conceptual constraints using examples and evaluates mathematical means provided by discrete structures needed for computation to describe their ability to cope with these challenges