The Federation Engineering AGreements Template (FEAT) will benefit all developers, managers, and users of distributed simulations by providing an unambiguous format for recording agreements about the design and use of the distributed simulation.  The template will also benefit this community by enabling the development of federation engineering tools that can read the schema and perform federation engineering tasks automatically.

Although the FEDEP explicitly calls for federation agreements and gives some guidance about the contents of such agreements, it provides no guidance on the format or structure of these agreements.  Currently federation agreements are recorded in multiple formats with ad hoc structures and content.  As a result, federation agreements are often incomplete and ill-structured, leading to errors and rework resulting from misunderstanding of the agreements. The community needs a detailed, unambiguous template for recording federation agreements.  Optimally, this template should be in a standardize format that can be used readily by automated federation engineering tools as well as read by federation participants.

The proposed PDG will develop an XML schema designed to record all federation agreements determined to be of use to federation developers and participants.  Under the M&S Steering Committee LVCAR Implementation program, a team led by JHU/APL has performed extensive research on existing federation agreements and templates.  From this research, this team has derived a detailed set of requirements for a FEAT.  The team has implemented an XML schema based on the requirements and performed some preliminary experimentation on applying the schema to a small, extant federation agreements document.  The team has also begun development of a Java-based tool to simplify development of federation agreements conformant with the XML schema.