Taking Advantages of Modern Distributed Infrastructures in Modelling and Simulation

During the last years, we are experiencing the overwhelming growth of on-line services. Web applications are able to provide such services, by using cooperative, heterogeneous, decentralized and distributed infrastructures and several technologies like consolidated Service-Oriented Architectures (WSDL, WSMO, SOAP, etc.) or emerging Resource-Oriented Architectures (e.g. RESTful, etc.). When we talk about Modelling and Simulation, HLAis the de-facto standard for what concerns interoperability: such a standard, like others less used, gives different simulations the capability to interoperate together, but nothing is done for what concern the implementation or the exploitation of services in order to give added value to the already existing simulations. This paper investigates the capabilities and benefits provided bymodern infrastructures currently adopted in the Web world, highlighting which kind of resources are available today online and can be accessed to enhance the quality of the simulation; then presents Selex ES approach to simulation, the SYENAsynthetic environment, which by integrating the traditional HLA standard with modern Web technologies allows to realise more convincing and impressive simulations.