  The prevailing net-centric environment demands and enables modeling and
simulation to combine efforts from numerous disciplines. Software techniques
and methodology, in particular service-oriented architecture, provide such an
opportunity. Service-oriented simulation has been an emerging paradigm
following on from object- and process-oriented methods. However, the ad-hoc
frameworks proposed so far generally focus on specific domains or systems and
each has its pros and cons. They are capable of addressing different issues
within service-oriented simulation from different viewpoints. It is
increasingly important to describe and evaluate the progress of numerous
frameworks. In this paper, we propose a novel three-dimensional reference model
for a service-oriented simulation paradigm. The model can be used as a
guideline or an analytic means to find the potential and possible future
directions of the current simulation frameworks. In particular, the model
inspects the crossover between the disciplines of modeling and simulation,
service-orientation, and software/systems engineering. Based on the model, we
present a comprehensive survey on several classical service-oriented simulation
frameworks, including formalism-based, model-driven, interoperability protocol
based, eXtensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF), and Open Grid
Services Architecture (OGSA) based frameworks etc. The comparison of these
frameworks is also performed. Finally the significance both in academia and
practice are presented and future directions are pointed out.
