Using Web services to integrate heterogeneous simulations in a grid environment

The distributed information technologies collectively known as Web services recently have demonstrated powerful capabilities for scalable interoperation of heterogeneous software across a wide variety of networked platforms. This approach supports a rapid integration cycle and shows promise for ultimately supporting automatic composability of services using discovery via registries. This paper presents a rationale for extending Web services to distributed simulation environments, together with a description and examples of the integration methodology used to develop significant prototype implementations, and argues for combining the power of Grid computing with Web services to further expand this demanding computation and database access environment.