Towards a methodological approach to identify future M&S standard needs

Abstract

Although Modeling and Simulation is successfully applied for several decades, the community only established a handful of M&S specific standards. Although the standards were applied enabling worldwide distributed simulation applications, in particular in the training application domain of military simulation systems, the general success of M&S standard efforts and their potential for general applicability has been debated repeatedly during several conferences and workshop. This collection of position statements discusses related questions, such as, "What makes M&S special that we need M&S standards," "Are M&S standards truly different from Software Engineering Standards," and "What metrics can be used to measure M&S standard success," and tries to contribute to establishing a methodological approach to identify 2975 978-1-4577-2109-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

A Call to Arms: Standards for Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation

“…As an academic discipline, M&S draws its background from a mixture of mathematics, systems engineering, industrial engineering, physics, and computer science. It is relatively new as a discipline, with the serious study of M&S being less than sixty years old, and it has been argued that M&S is still in its theoretical infancy (Tolk et al 2011). As the discipline matures, new practices, approaches and paradigms will emerge, including the development of new standards within the M&S community.…”

“…By reuse, we mean a simulation that can be used for multiple purposes, that is, the simulation is used to answer multiple questions. There are some that do not like this term "reuse" as they argue that simulation should be built for a purpose and, as such, has a modeling intent (Tolk et al 2011).…”

“…Heath et al (2009) identify verification and validation as major issues for ABMS. Tolk et al (2011) asserts that standards need to be: valuable (is there a market? ), desirable (is there seen to be a problem?…”

“…Is M&S unique in some way? It has been argued that M&S is its own subject area, as opposed to a subset of some other academic subject such as systems engineering, in part because it has its own unresolved problems, e.g., composability (Weisel et al 2003;Davis & Anderson 2004;King 2009) and M&S interoperability (Tolk et al 2011). In regards to M&S standards, beyond dealing with the unique discipline of M&S, are their development and governance really any different from the thousands of other standards development organization?…”