The need for interoperability between different military simulation systems is growing fast, as the complexity of modern war fighting rises above the handling capacity of monolithic models. The development of consistent model federations has therefore become as important as the development of new (interoperable) models. However, complex military simulation systems belong to the class of model-based information systems, and the paramount aspects of such information systems are abstraction and idealization from reality. Experiments with the high-resolution combat simulation system, COSIMAC, and some modules implementing basic command and control functionality have shown that there are pressing challenges for coupling model-based information systems above the currently manageable levels. The results of this contribution indicate that technical, syntactic, and obvious semantic (lexicographic) coupling preconditions are not sufficient to guarantee a successful interaction.
Model calibration is the task of adjusting an already existing model to a reference system. In general, this is done by adjusting model parameters to a set of given samples from the reference system. Model calibration is often regarded to be necessary for complex simulation models in order to create a homomorphic ("structurally equivalent") abstraction of (a special aspect of) reality. This paper introduces a formal approach to model calibration. Within the frame of this formalism it is shown that the computational complexity of model calibration is NP-complete. The practical implications of these theoretic results are presumably of minor importance for most single models. However, for huge model federations the complexity of parameter calibration could draw a serious line with respect to the validation of the federation and its cost-benefit ratio.
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