Thumbnail: click to enlarge

FAMOS Functional Architecture

In this initiative, KBSI collaborated with the Air Force to build a system for the development and execution of distributed military simulation applications. The Framework for Adaptive Modeling and Ontology-driven Simulation (FAMOS™) reduces the time and effort required for developing and deploying distributed simulation applications and lays the groundwork for knowledge sharing, communication, and semantic integration among modeling and simulation applications.

The FAMOS™ technology addresses a number of current needs for the military. In particular, distributed simulation has been hampered by the absence of a framework for assembling simulations from model components and distributing those simulation models among different organizations or functional groups. The FAMOS™ technology takes on the primary technical challenges related to these goals including the composibility of simulation models, semantic interoperability, and model composition at multiple levels of abstraction.

The FAMOS™ initiative used a hybrid approach that combines ontology and process analysis methods with ontology-driven translation generation techniques to facilitate robust simulation composability analysis and support semantic modeling and simulation interoperability. FAMOS™ technology addressed the issue of simulation model composibility—the capability to select simulation components and assemble them into simulation systems that satisfy specific user requirements—by focusing on the processes, ontologies, and meta data for composibility. KBSI's extensive experience in developing simulation and information integration technologies was particularly useful in meeting the initiative's process and ontology analysis challenges. The result was a complete analysis method for composable modeling and simulation.

The FAMOS™ architecture provides automated support for this method, and KBSI validated the technical and pragmatic viability of the FAMOS™ approach and architecture through focused military simulation model composition experiments and demonstrations.

The principal benefits of the FAMOS™ method and architecture are significant reductions in the time and effort needed for developing and deploying distributed simulation applications, and in the time and effort needed to facilitate knowledge sharing, communication, and semantic integration for modeling and simulation applications. These benefits will help the Air Force in developing distributed simulation applications. In addition, FAMOS™ technology also serves as a sustainable mechanism for building simulations that interoperate and share information at the semantic level.

This material is based upon work supported by the United States Air Force under Contract No. FA8650-06-C-4403.  Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force.