BRAND_NAME_JUSTIFICATION.pdf

BRAND NAME JUSTIFICATION

Only Portico or substitute software tool vendors:

NIST is assembling a test bed for the purpose of doing research on Smart Grid and Cyber- Physical systems (SG/CPS Testbed). A key component of this testbed is a platform that enables federated experiments.

A federated experiment consists of reusable software and hardware components called federates that are combined into a larger federation to perform some useful experiment. A federate could be a piece of equipment or a simulation model, and can be located anywhere such as on a local machine, in the cloud, or at geographically dispersed test facilities.

The NIST Smart Grid/CPS Office is working with an open source tool suite that can graphically model federate I/O and generate source code and build files for a federate based on its graphical representation. The generated source code may be standalone or it may have additional hardware or software dependencies that must be resolved prior to deployment. In addition to federate source code, our tool suite can also generate experimental configurations which script the runtime behavior of federates and include deployment information such as where the built executable for each federate should be run.

This requirement is to satisfy the need to upgrade and expand the existing Portico platform by developing and implementing compatible software tools that seamlessly match or substitute the existing platform.

Alternative software tools would compromise the integrity of the current platform. Alternative software tools would not satisfy conformance to the HLA standard.

Alternative software tools introduce uncertainty in our federated testbed architecture.