HLA Time Management: Design Document Version 1.0

This document describes the recommendations of the time management working group concerning functionality and design of the time management component of the HLA. Specifically, the recommended services provided by the RTI related to time management are described, their envisioned use, and in some cases, possible approaches for implementation. This is an evolving, working document that describes both the current status of the design and directions for future evolution. 1. Overview A federation execution can be viewed as a collection of federates, each performing a sequence of computations. Some of these computations are referred to as events, and some of these events are relevant to other federates. The RTI notifies other federates that have indicated an interest in an event by sending messages to them containing information concerning the event. Consider a real-time (e.g., a human-in-the-loop or a hardware-in-the-loop) federation execution, a principal application domain for the HLA. In an ideal world, delays associated with the execution of modeling computations and latencies in the communication network during the federation execution would be identical to delays in the system being modeled, resulting in