This paper is about the flexible composition of efficient simulation models. It presents the realization of a component framework that can be added as an additional layer on top of simulation systems. It builds upon platform independent specifications of components in XML to evaluate dependency relationships and parameters during composition. The process of composition is split up into four stages. Starting from XML documents component instances are created. These can be customized and arranged to form a composition. Finally, a composition is transformed to an executable simulation model. The first three stages are general applicable to simulation systems; the last one depends on the Parallel DEVS formalism and the simulation system James II.

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.

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