M&S as a Service: Expectations and Challenges

Modeling & Simulation as a Service (MSaaS) is a concept that potentially offers all kinds of possibilities to support M&S users and providers. For many reasons service-based approaches are considered to be very promising architectures for realizing next generation simulation environments. The combination of service-based approaches with ideas taken from cloud computing is known as "Modeling & Simulation as a Service". Over the past year, NATO Modeling and Simulation Group MSG-131 ("Modelling and Simulation as a Service: New concepts and Service Oriented Architectures") has investigated the concept of MSaaS and collected national perspectives and experiences regarding MSaaS. The resulting "Multi-National Concept for M&S as a Service" provides an overview about the nations' activities in this area and is input to "NATO M&S as a Service Concept" that is currently being developed by NATOs Allied Command Transformation (ACT). This paper presents the most recent results of NATO MSG-131 Specialist Team in the area of MSaaS and related national results from research and development activities. It illustrates potential benefits that may be achieved by MSaaS and challenges that remain to be solved. National experiences with service-based distributed simulation environments are reported.