Editing High Level Architecture (section)

===Ownership Management Services===
The purpose of Ownership Management services, described in chapter 7 of the HLA Interface Specification,<ref name="IFSPEC" /> is to dynamically manage what federate that simulates what aspect of an object instance. In HLA, only one federate is allowed to update a given attribute of a given object instance. That federate is considered the owner of the attribute. A federate that registers a new object instance will automatically be the owner of all attributes it publishes. In some cases, attributes of an object instance may become unowned, i.e. not owned by any federate.

Ownership management provides services for transferring ownership of one or several attributes at runtime, which can include a federate Divesting the attribute and another federate Acquiring the attribute. There are two main patterns: “pull” that are initiated by the acquiring federate and “push” that are initiated by the divesting federate.

Key services for initiating “pull” ownership are:
* AttributeOwnershipAcquisitionIfAvailable which is used by a federate that wishes to acquire ownership of unowned attributes. 
* AttributeOwnershipAcquisition which is used by a federate that wishes to request ownership of a potentially owned attribute

Key services for initiating “push” ownership are:
* AttributeOwnershipDivestitureIfWanted which is used by a federate that wishes to divest attributes only if there is some other federate that is standing by to acquire ownership of these attributes. 
* NegotiatedAttributeOwnershipDivestiture, which is similar but may also cause the RTI to try to find a new owner. 
* UnconditionalAttributeOwnershipDivestiture, which is used by a federate that wishes to give up ownership, even if no new owner can be found.

All object instances have a predefined attribute called HLAPrivilegeToDeleteObject. Only the owner of this attribute for an object instance is allowed to delete the object instance. Ownership of this attribute can be transferred at runtime using the above operations.