Modeling and simulation frameworks for use in different application domains, throughout the complete development process, and in different hardware environments need to be highly scalable. For achieving an efficient execution, different simulation algorithms and data structures must be provided to compute a concrete model on a concrete platform efficiently. The support of parallel simulation techniques becomes increasingly important in this context, which is due to the growing availability of multi-core processors and network-based computers. This leads to more complex simulation systems that are harder to configure correctly. We present an experimentation layer for the modeling and simulation framework JAMES II. It greatly facilitates the configuration and usage of the system for a user and supports distributed optimization, on-demand observation, and various distributed and non-distributed scenarios.

Microsimulation is an increasingly popular tool in the social sciences. Individual behavior is described by a (commonly stochastic) model and subsequently simulated to study outcomes on the aggregate level. Demographic projections are a prominent area of application. Despite numerous available tools often new software is designed and implemented for specific applications. In this paper we describe how a modeling and simulation framework, JAMES II, was used to create a specialized tool for population projections, the MIC-CORE. Reusing validated and well-tested modeling and simulation functionality significantly reduced development time while keeping performance levels high. We document how the MIC-CORE was built as plug-ins to JAMES II and illustrate the performance of the resulting tool. We demonstrate how the concept of a modeling and simulation framework enabled successful software reuse of available functionality and briefly report of future work.

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International audienceThe development of M&S products often seems to be driven by need: people start coding because they are interested in either a concrete simulation study, or they are interested in a (single) research subject of M&S methodology. We claim that discussing, designing, developing, and comparing M&S products should be based on software engineering concepts. We shortly introduce some of these engineering concepts and discuss how these relate to the M&S domain. By describing two examples, OSA and JAMES II, we illustrate that reuse might play an important role in the development of high quality M&S products as the examples allow reuse on the level of models and scenarios, on the level of "simulation studies", of algorithms (e.g., reuse of event queues, random number generators), across hardware architectures / operating systems, and of analysis tools

Agents are software systems aimed at working in dynamic environments. Simulation systems can be used to provide virtual environments for testing agents. The software to be tested, the objective of the simulation study, and the stage of the agent software development influences both: the environmental models used for testing and the mechanisms that synchronize the execution of agents and simulation. A clear distinction between model and simulation layer, and a modular design of the simulation system support the required flexibility. Based on the simulation system James (a Java based Agent Modeling Environment for Simulation) and two agent applications we will explore, how interfaces between virtual environments and software agents can be explicitly specified at the modeling level and suitable mechanisms for synchronization might be chosen on demand.