Using Web Services to Integrate Heterogeneous Simulations in a Grid Environment

The distributed information technologies collectively known as Web services recently have demonstrated powerful capabilities for scalable interoperation of heterogeneous software across a wide variety of networked platforms. This approach supports a rapid integration cycle and shows promise for ultimately supporting automatic composability of services using discovery via registries. This paper presents a rationale for extending Web services to distributed simulation environments, including the High Level Architecture (HLA), together with a description and examples of the integration methodology used to develop significant prototype implementations. A logical next step is combining the power of Grid computing with Web services to facilitate rapid integration in a demanding computation and database access environment. This combination, which has been called Grid services, is an emerging research area with challenging problems to be faced in bringing Web services and Grid computing together effectively