SEE HLA Starter Kit

The SEE HLA Starter Kit is a software package that greatly simplifies the task of building HLA federates that need to be compliant with the SpaceFOM standard. Historically, it has been used in the Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) program to support the development of distributed components of space simulations by student teams across the world. It includes the following:

• A software framework known as the Starter Kit Framework (SKF) provided as a Java library
• Technical documentation in the form of a dedicated wiki, JavaDocs, and sample code
• A starter template project called Baseplate that enables rapid setup and development of federates

The SKF is intuitively-designed to serve as a simplified abstraction of the HLA Java API. As of the latest release (v2), it is fully compliant with the latest specifications of the HLA standard, IEEE 1516-2025 (HLA 4), and has been successfully tested on Pitch pRTI, an industry-leading RTI implementation from BAE Systems OneArc.

The latest release of the framework is available from the releases page. The wiki contains detailed instructions for building from source and other relevant documentation.

The development of the SEE HLA Starter Kit is an international effort that sees contributions from the following institutions:

• Systems Engineering and Integration (SEI) team in the System Modeling and Simulation Hub (SMASH) Lab of the Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems Engineering (DIMES) at the University of Calabria (Italy)
• NASA Johnson Space Center (Houston, TX, United States)
• The Modelling and Simulation Group (MSG) at Brunel University of London (United Kingdom)

Development Team

University of Calabria

• Alfredo Garro <[email protected]> (Coordinator)
• Alberto Falcone <[email protected]> (Main developer)
• Andrea Tundis <[email protected]> (Developer)

Brunel University of London

• Hridyanshu Aatreya <[email protected]> (Main developer)

Resources

• Official project website
• Java API Documentation
• Baseplate (Starter Project Template)
• Manual
• Tutorials

Acknowledgement

The SKF development team thanks Edwin Z. Crues (NASA JSC) for his valuable input and suggestions that aided the development of the SEE HLA Starter Kit. A big thank you to the NASA staff involved in the Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) for organizing the program each year to great effect: Priscilla Elfrey, Paige Whittington, Stephen Paglialonga, Michael Conroy, Dan Dexter, Daniel Oneil, and Björn Möller (BAE Systems OneArc). We also thank our users, the members of teams that have participated in SEE over the years as well.

A special note of immense gratitude to Garratt Weblin and the BAE Systems OneArc organization for graciously providing assistance and software licenses, which facilitated the development of the upgraded version 2.0 of the SEE HLA Starter Kit.

License

The SEE HLA Starter Kit is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3. Check the LICENSE file for further information.

Publications

1. Falcone, A., Garro, A., Taylor, S. J. E., Anagnostou, A., Chaudhry, N. R., Salah, O. Experiences in simplifying distributed simulation: The HLA development kit framework. Journal of Simulation, 10(37), 1–20. http://doi.org/10.1057/s41273-016-0039-4, (2016).

2. Anagnostou, A., Chaudhry, N.R., Falcone, A., Garro, A., Salah, O., Taylor, S.J.E., Easing the development of HLA Federates: the HLA Development Kit and its exploitation in the SEE Project. In Proc. of the 19th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (ACM/IEEE DS-RT), Chengdu, China, October, 14-16, IEEE Computer Society, (2015).

3. Anagnostou, A., Chaudhry, N.R., Falcone, A., Garro, A., Salah, O., Taylor, S.J.E., A Prototype HLA Development Kit: Results from the 2015 Simulation Exploration Experience. In Proc. of the ACM SIGSIM PADS 2015, London, UK, June, 10-12, (2015).

4. Bocciarelli, P., D’Ambrogio, A., Falcone, A., Garro, A., Giglio, A., A model-driven approach to enable the distributed simulation of complex systems. In Proc. of the 6th Complex Systems Design & Management (CSD&M) 2015, Paris, France, November 23-25, (2015).

5. Falcone, A., Garro, A., Longo, F., Spadafora, F., SimulationExploration Experience: A Communication System and a 3D Real Time Visualization for a Moon base simulated scenario. In Proc. of the 18th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (ACM/IEEE DS-RT), Toulouse, France, October, 1-3, IEEE Computer Society, (2014).