Developing an HLA Tutorial: Philosophy and Best Practices

ABSTRACT: A standard, like HLA, needs to be exact, complete and unambiguous. This may not be optimal for a beginner wanting to learn HLA. An up-to-date HLA Tutorial document has now been developed. This paper summarizes some of the philosophy of the tutorial. Several best practices on how to use the standard are also covered in the tutorial.
One of the philosophies of the tutorial is to describe how services from different service groups are used to solve common tasks instead of strictly describing the structure of the HLA standard. Another philosophy is to
emphasize how concepts from the HLA Interface Specification and the HLA Object Model Template are used together.


The best practices covered include low-level aspects like optimal memory allocation, handling of HLA service exceptions as well as life-cycle management of shared objects. Selected architectural aspects are also covered, like the use of a federate architecture that separates HLA concerns from domain simulation concerns, federate testing strategies and a basic Federation Agreement sample.


The tutorial, together with C++ and Java sample code, is freely available to industry, academia and anyone interested in learning HLA.

Authors: Björn Möller, Steve Eriksson, Åsa Wihlborg.
Publication: Proceedings of 2012 Fall Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 12F-SIW-047, Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization, September 2012

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