Over the last decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Science and Technology Organization (STO) has conducted a series of Research Task Group (RTG) activities focused on realizing the concept of “Modelling and Simulation (M&S) as a Service (MSaaS).” Of the many Science & Technology (S&T) topics investigated to enhance MSaaS benefits, simulation services composition has emerged as especially critical. Composition in a MSaaS context concerns determining the simulation services to deploy and execute in order to fulfill the simulation requirements for a particular use case. Moving towards a service-oriented, cloud-enabled M&S architecture necessitates simulation engineers to have a different perspective than in traditional simulation environments. Based on the national inputs from MSaaS RTG participants, as well as results from related S&T efforts, a reference information model has been developed for composition that accounts for the important considerations, topics, properties, and data elements that a “MSaaS project” should have in an implementation.

This paper will describe the work related to composition in the NATO MSaaS context. It will describe why composition in a MSaaS context is different from the traditional simulation composition, present the reference information model, and explain which elements of the information model are reusable across “MSaaS environments,” and which are specific to each implementation. This paper will also discuss how conceptual information from the domain of interest may be leveraged in the “MSaaS Simulation Engineering Process” to ensure the resulting service composition is meaningful and valid. Finally, we will substantiate why composition is one of the major capabilities for organizations to address when moving towards a MSaaS paradigm.

Keywords
INTEROPERABILITY;M&S AS A SERVICE

Additional Keywords
Composability, Simulation architecture