Improving a Brokering System for Linking Distributed Simulations

The Agent Based Environment for Linking Simulations (ABELS) is a software framework designed to provide disparate simulations with dynamically updated data sources. It allows simulations and other agents to join a "cloud" of interacting producers and consumers of data. Once they have joined the cloud, they can publish services to other members and use methods published by others. This paper presents the initial design of a set of matchmaking components for the ABELS framework. These components dictate how services describe their abilities and requirements to ABELS. Furthermore, they help ABELS successfully match data producing services to the requests of data consuming clients. We begin by describing a system for a data producing service to describe itself to the ABELS cloud, as well as a corresponding system for a data consumer to describe its needs. We then describe in detail the three components that make up the ABELS matchmaking system: the match ranker, which ranks a data producer's ability to fill the request of a data consumer; the thesaurus, which helps the match ranker recognize closely related terms; and the unit database, which allows participants in the ABELS system to translate between related data units. We also discuss how these basic components can be built upon and improved in future versions of the ABELS framework.