Interoperable Architectures vs. Simulations vs. Customers

Interoperability between diverse simulation systems has been a major focus since the 1990's. We have made huge strides since then. The limits that we experience in interoperability today are not due to poor designs of architectures or infrastructures. DIS, HLA, TENA, and others offer more opportunities for interoperability than we are able to exploit. Limitations in interoperability are generally due to the need to keep old (and expensive to replace) simulations in the inventory. There can be no magically engineered architecture that can pull together all of the extremely different data, model, and interface representations in dozens of existing simulations. To create a distributed simulation environment that is tightly linked (or highly interoperable) we have to create new architectures and new simulation systems that match each other. Tying old models to a new architecture or infrastructure will always be a suboptimal solution.