A Case Study of the Development and use of a MANA-Based Federation for Studying U.S. Border Operations

A federation approach is used to expand the geographic extent of MANA (map aware non-uniform automata), a cellular-automaton based agent simulation, in order to support a study of investment strategies for border protection along a portion of the southern U.S. border. The federation is implemented using the Department of Defense (DoD) high level architecture (HLA). Federation performance is optimized using HLA Data Distribution Management (DDM) services and through a bypass of the normal HLA mechanisms for ownership transfer. Analysis of the running federation indicates that overhead due to federation processing is minimal - less than 6% of the total federation runtime (94% of the runtime is due to processing in the MANA simulations)