Distributed collaboration is an emerging technology that will significantly change how modeling and simulation is employed in 21st century organizations. Modeling and simulation (M&S) is already an integral part of how many organizations conduct business and, in the future, will continue to spread throughout government and industry enterprises across many domains from research and development to manufacturing to training to medicine. For example, in the Department of Defense, M&S allows organizations to do things that would otherwise be unaffordable (i.e., thousands of parametric sensitivity tests on new systems) or physically difficult to accomplish (evaluations of proposed systems in unusual or austere circumstances).
Advances in software and computer technology are making distributed collaborative environments with integrated M&S possible and affordable for the scientific and engineering process in government and industry research. Collaborative simulation is becoming a crucial means of information and knowledge sharing and systems integration for research and development.