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Service orientation, and more recently, the notions of cloud technology that service orientation enable, are designed to accommodate the need for flexible enterprise business processes. Through standardized interfaces, a service‐oriented architecture (SOA) should enable one to build and rebuild software systems readily and rapidly in a methodological manner. However, certain domains have specialized architectural standards; an example in point is modeling and simulation (M&S), for which there exist mature architectural standards, that may even have many of the characteristics strived for in SOA. An important issue is, therefore, how to integrate specialized architectures into a wider SOA. Using defense information systems and M&S as a case, we outline a hybrid architecture framework for specialized architectures in an encompassing SOA. Although it may be possible to dissolve a specialized architecture into the encompassing SOA at implementation time, we argue that it is important to be able to model the specialized architecture as an integral intact part. We further advocate a pragmatic notion of reference architecture in terms of appropriate level of abstraction and domain specificity to avoid pitfalls that may render architecture work unusable.

In the military, Command and Control Information Systems (C2ISs) are used for issuing commands to subordinate units. In training or decision support, simulations are used instead of live military forces. The Coalition Battle Management Language (C-BML) is currently being developed as an interface language between C2ISs, simulations and robotic forces, and Norway (FFI) and the Netherlands (TNO) are working towards extending their national C2ISs and a COTS simulation system with a C-BML interface. One of the challenges encountered during this work is the fact that the orders issued by the C2IS are at company level and above, while most available simulation systems are designed to execute platoon and single platform tasks. Both FFI and TNO are investigating using a multi-agent system for decomposing orders to lower level task by simulating national tactics and doctrine. This paper presents and compares our development approaches and agent modeling paradigms.

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