What is a Standard?
Standards Products are formally approved items that reflect consensus agreements on products, practices, or operations, as required, by simulation industry applications. SISO Standards are to be stable, well understood, technically competent, and have multiple independent interoperable implementations. In addition they should enjoy significant public support, and be recognizably useful in some or all parts of the simulation community. Compliance with a SISO Standard requires conformance with all of the “shalls” of the Product Principles:

Generality
Standards Products shall be as general as possible, while still maintaining usefulness, to support the broadest community of current and future users. 		Stability
Standards Products shall be established and changed only as necessary.  They shall be prototyped and tested before being proposed for adoption to demonstrate their maturity. 		Supportability
Standards Products shall maintain the integrity of the existing product suite and the needs of the user.
How do standards help?

There are different types of Standards to meet the needs of the M&S community. These include:

  • Interoperability Standards - Enable simulation “parts” to be plugged together for rapid assembly of systems.  Enable reuse of “parts” developed for one system in another application.  Enable innovative new “parts” to easily replace obsolete old “parts”
  • Accreditation Standards and Practices - Provide confidence to the user that the assembled system is providing meaningful, valid results to the degree specified in the accreditation.
  • Process Standards and Practices - Provide for efficiency, effectiveness, and repeatability in assembly and utilization of distributed simulation

Standards enable greater capability, interoperability, credibility, reuse, and cost-effectiveness to the global community of modeling and simulation professionals and industries.  SISO develops standards and other products that are relevant, timely, of superior quality, and responsive to the needs of the worldwide M&S community. SISO strives to ensure that M&S applications and technologies are accessible to all potential users without compromising members’ competitive or intellectual property interests. Meeting on this common ground, the community shares ideas, debates issues, reaches consensus, and develops standards and other products for the advancement and benefit of the worldwide M&S community.  

View Approved Standards


Technical Acceptance

To become a SISO Product, standards must be developed based on the Technical Acceptance Principles:

Relevant - SISO Products shall be relevant to the Modeling and Simulation community.

Substantive - SISO Products shall provide meaningful information and/or results.

Timely - SISO Products shall be produced in an efficient manner to ensure that the product is useful to the community.

Community Review & Acceptance - SISO Products shall be reviewed by the technical community to which the product applies. This may be a narrow niche or the community broadly defined.

Learn about the Processes & Procedures a standard goes through before it is accepted!