Simulation templates in the SUMMIT system

ABSTRACT: Emergency management personnel at all levels can benefit from the use of simulation as a planning or exercise support tool, but knowledge of existing resources and the expertise needed to provision a simulation with data, execute it, and interpret and synthesize results are not uniformly available to all. To meet these needs, the DHS Science & Technology Directorate is funding the development of a Standard Unified Modeling and Mapping Integration Toolkit (SUMMIT). SUMMIT brings distributed simulation codes together with metadata, heuristic domain knowledge, a uniform interface, integration capability and automation. The system emphasizes integration of existing resources around the central notion of simulation templates, which serve as a conduit through which experts can package a category of models together with domain knowledge and best practices for their use. Simulation templates provide an abstraction that presents different interfaces to model users and model owners, while hiding the details of model assembly and execution. This paper will discuss the initial SUMMIT architecture and demonstrate how simulation templates allow for guided discovery, provisioning, combination, assembly and presentation of simulations. SUMMIT is platform and runtime agnostic, but this paper will focus on a cascade-model implementation in Java