This master report deals with the development of tools and concepts for the transition of the "High Level Architecture for Modeling and Simulation" (HLA) into in heterogeneous networks. The HLA technology, which has been developed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), was initially created with a special focus on military simulation applications and their special needs for interoperability and re-usability. Since the general problems in the global networks as well as in the military simulation community are comparable, the question of whether the HLA technology can be used in Internet domains needed to be solved. Therefore this work analyzes the similarities and the differences in both simulation communities and develops techniques and prototypical solutions for the application of HLA in the heterogeneous networks. The fact, that the Internet simulation community makes use of highly developed and specialized (mostly commercial) simulation systems to build their simulation models constitutes one of the major differences between both simulation communities. Therefore the special focus of this work is on the development of solutions for the HLA-based coupling of these existing commercial simulation systems. Special concepts and solutions which were not part of the initial HLA definition needed to be established for this purpose. The main part of the work to demonstrate that HLA is not only applicable in Internet domains, but also that there is an actual need and a potential market for HLA-based simulation solutions. DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION, HIGH LEVEL ARCHITECTURE, INTERNET DOMAIN, NETWORK
