The challenges faced by today's warfighter - more agile and innovative adversaries in widely varying operational environments - are steadily increasing. To respond effectively, the training and education community must provide timely, relevant and efficient training for operators in a resource constrained environment. The ability to rapidly compose Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) environments is central in addressing this challenge. Current LVC infrastructures lack native support for a variety of critical functions, such as fault tolerance, composition, mediation, load balancing, and information assurance. As a result, several problems are evident: development of custom solutions is pervasive, making them difficult to reintegrate; lack of support for agile re-use (e.g., algorithms or libraries); current Modeling & Simulation (M&S) architectures are not adapted to support net-centric environments or enterprise Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs); and the mixed architecture LVC environments lead to throughput limitations, and increased latency, that affect scalability.

A new, converged, composable simulation architecture is needed to facilitate re-use of LVC assets, and optimize performance and scalability across the wide range of M&S activities. In order to enable the transformation and evolution, a new approach for harnessing the creative talents of developers supporting the M&S community is required. This paper describes a high-level design, business model, and standards approach for a futuristic LVC Architecture Framework (LVCAF). A mixed business model, consisting of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) and open source, is of particular interest. New standards governing such a system, and the Communities of Interest (COIs), needed to implement the approach are discussed.