On the Design of ISI's (Information Sciences Institute) Initial Prototype SDI Architecture Simulator

Abstract : This report describes the software design of the first prototype strategic defense architecture simulation system developed under ISIs 'SDI communications Research' contract. While the long-term goal of the simulation task is to investigate techniques for speeding up simulators of this type via parallelism, this system is a sequential program in which it must be possible to: incorporate nontrivial, executable representations of the battle management computations taking place on any defense platform within the simulation; and change the candidate defense architecture being modeled independently of the simulation software that models the external physical environment. The report documents our approach to designing a simulator that meets those requirements. It includes both a description of the software design and some historical material about our design process: what design decisions we made, why we made them, and what alternatives were considered at the time.