Dynamic Information Architecture System (DIAS)

Real-world dynamic landscapes are characterized by the interplay of diverse natural and anthropogenic processes that interact both within and across discipline boundaries, and at varying spatial and temporal scales. It is a major challenge to assemble a simulation system that can successfully capture the dynamics of such complex systems: it is an even more serious challenge to nimbly adapt such a simulation to shifting and expanding analysis requirements and contexts. The Dynamic Information Architecture System (DIAS), developed by Argonne National Laboratory, helps to address these needs.

DIAS is a flexible, extensible, object-oriented framework for developing and maintaining complex simulations. DIAS supports fully distributed simulations in which the dynamic behaviors of the software “domain objects,” representing the diverse entities that populate a simulation, are implemented by an ensemble of simulation models (new models and/or existing “legacy” models) implemented in virtually any programming language. DIAS is expressly designed to address complex, cross-domain modeling problems over a wide range of simulation fidelity and level of detail.

DIAS has been under development at Argonne since 1993 for a series of governmental and private sector sponsors with very diverse needs. DIAS is explicitly designed to be context-neutral; that is, it supports simulations in essentially any domain. DIAS application areas to date include dynamic terrain- and weather-influenced military unit mobility assessment; integrated land management at military bases; a dynamic virtual oceanic environment; clinical, physiological, and logistical aspects of health care delivery; avian social behavior and population dynamics; and studies of agricultural sustainability under environmental stress in ancient Mesopotamia. A United States patent has also been granted for DIAS.