Introducing the Federation Engineering Lessons Learned Exchange

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Introducing the Federation EngineeringLessons
Learned Exchange
5 April 2006
Thomas J. Pawlowski III, PhD pawlowst_at_mitre.org
R. Douglas Flournoy rflourno_at_mitre.org
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Outline

• Motivation
• Challenges
• Design
• Content
• Toward Best Practices
• Join and Participate!

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Motivation

• Over the past decade, HLA federations have
  successfully supported testing, training,
  analysis, experimentation
• however, designing and implementing each new
  federation remains complex
• Theres more to successful federations than
  meets the eye in the specs and programmers
  manuals
• To ease current/future federation efforts, lets
  capture the valuable lessons learned from past
  experiences!

In order to capture these lessons and make them
more accessible to federation engineers, the
Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) is
providing the Federation Engineering Lessons
Learned Exchange
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Motivation (contd)

• February 05 Performance Workshop _at_ JHU/APL
• One of top 5 recommended areas to pursue
• Capture and dissemination of knowledge could
  result in significant time, money savings
• Soon after this workshop, DMSO began work on the
  Lessons Learned Exchange

Formulation of a Best Practices Guide based on
community lessons learned.
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Challenges

• Design
• What mechanisms do we need, and how do we present
  these mechanisms, to
• encourage federation engineers to post their
  knowledge?
• enable quick easy knowledge search
  retrieval?
• Content
• What metadata should be associated with the
  lessons as they are entered?
• Should lessons be approved before posting?
• If so, what are the ground rules?

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DesignSociety for Effective Lessons Learned
Sharing (SELLS)

• Others must be capturing and sharing community
  lessons learned over the WWW lets learn from
  them
• Found SELLS website http//www.eh.doe.gov/ll
• Capturing/sharing knowledge within DOE community
  (nuclear power plant safety, )
• Mechanisms for engineers to post, search lessons
• DOE Standard 7501-99 The DOE Corporate Lessons
  Learned Program
• Their LL Website
• Uses MS FrontPage for users screens MS Access
  for storing data
• Contains 1200 lessons learned (as of summer 2002)
• Is maintained by a team of 2-3 engineers
• Is motivated by safety in addition to cost
  technical issues

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DesignLessons Learned by the Lessons Learned
Society

• 6 years of DOE LL Website evolution captured in
  white paper Building a Better Lessons Learned
  Program
• Need click-on category search capabilities in
  addition to general word search capability
• Determining the best category breakdown is an
  art categories will evolve over time
• Impact of system hard to quantify
• Cant force community of practice to use the
  knowledge base
• Need to solicit LL Website success stories and
  manage expectations
• LL Website facilitates community-wide roll-up
  reports (Best Practices matl) in focused areas
  of practice
• Make push mechanisms available
• For immediate notification on posted lessons,
  users can subscribe to their areas of interest

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DesignChoosing a Software Basis

• SELLS DOE Website chose a traditional approach
• Microsoft FrontPage for user screens
• Microsoft Access for data storage
• We decided to explore more recent advances in
  social computing
• Looked at popular wiki style
• too unstructured
• Prefer emerging Community of Practice s/w
  packages
• Offer ready-made capabilities to facilitate data
  entry, user access
• Facilitate initial site generation without
  requiring custom database coding or html screen
  generation
• For our initial implementation, we settled on
  Microsoft SharePoint

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Design Lesson Learned Submission Process
User observes potential lesson
User logs in to Lesson Learned Website
User completes Lesson Learned template and
Submits lesson
System notifies Review Panel members of
new submission via email
Review Panel member reviews Submission
Valid Lesson?
Discard submission provide reason to submitter
End
No
Yes
Approve Submission as valid Lesson Learned
Lesson Posted to Website
End
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ContentLesson Entry Template (1 of 3)

• Title/Date
• POC Information
• Overview statements

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ContentLesson Entry Template (2 of 3)

• FEDEP steps
• RTI service groups
• Performance-related topics
• Data engineering topics

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ContentLesson Entry Template (3 of 3)

• Federation descriptors
• HLA Spec Version
• RTI Version
• Attachment
• Other references

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ContentLesson Approval Guidelines

• Looking for lessons from actual federation
  engineering experience
• Not merely restating info already available in
  specs user guides
• Lesson should not be overtly marketing-oriented
• Lesson should be generally constructive in nature
• Where possible, should cite solutions rather than
  dwelling on difficulties
• Public release approval for lesson metadata and
  attachments

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ContentLesson Sources to Date

• Previously published conference/journal papers
• Presentation materials from the February 2005 HLA
  Performance Workshop
• RTI tuning recommendations
• HLA transition experiences

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ContentLesson Topics to Date

• Federation Design
• Use of the FEDEP Process
• Improving Federation Performance
• Tuning your RTI
• Managing Entity Ownership
• Flooding the Receiver
• Use of tick()
• Federation Development
• Federate Callback Latency
• Keeping Federates in Sync
• Making a Federate more HLA Compatible

Network Tips Reducing Network Usage Making best
use of bandwidth Reducing Latency Use of
Multicast Use of Gateways Managing Data Dividing
Data Flow Multi-Resolution Data Exchanges
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Toward Best Practices

• Challenge Areas where the Exchange can support
  generation of community-wide rollup reports
  include
• Federation Performance
• The Exchange is currently supporting the SISO HLA
  Performance Recommended Practices (HPRP) Study
  Group
• RTI Transition
• Growing need to update federations to more recent
  versions of RTIs
• Mixed Middleware Federations
• Increasing use of combinations of DIS, TENA, HLA,
  and other data exchange methods
• Object Modeling
• Capture the growing body of knowledge on use of
  BOMs and other advanced object modeling tricks
  of the trade
• Data Collection and After-Action Review
• Extracting the most value out of federation
  execution results

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Join and Participate!

• To Request a New Account
• https//partners.mitre.org/accountsetup/new/d
  efault.html
• To Access the Web Portal
• https//partners.mitre.org/sites/hla_ll/defau
  lt.aspx
• Or Send Email to
• Tom Pawlowski pawlowst_at_mitre.org
• Website Coordinator
• Doug Flournoy rflourno_at_mitre.org
• Website Coordinator
• HPRP Study Group Secretary
• Randy Sanders Randy.Saunders_at_jhuapl.edu
• HPRP Study Group Chair