An approach for the unified time management mechanism for HLA

The High Level Architecture (HLA) is the IEEE 1516 standard to model and design a distributive simulation environment. It establishes a common distributed simulation framework, which facilitates the interoperability and reuse of simulation components. However, some HLA services are very low level and difficult to use, especially when a simulation is designed with a particular time synchronization mechanism. This article describes an agent interface, called Smart Time Management (STM). The capabilities of the STM include the following: taking over the event's time-stamp tagging work, maintaining a lookahead value, and unifying different time advance approaches provided by the HLA runtime infrastructure. In addition, it adopts the time warp mechanism for optimistic simulation. In conclusion, the STM presents a unified and scalable middle layer to allow the user to construct an HLA federation with a unanimous Time Management interface when solving the synchronization issue.