A software architecture to ease the development of distributed simulation systems

Abstract

The simulation of modern systems may require an amount of computational resources that might not be available on a single host. Distributed simulation (DS) provides an effective way to scale up for the increased computational requirements. However, using existing DS environments remains the main obstacle to the wide adoption of DS systems, because of their inherent complexity. This complexity can be quantitatively shown by the extra effort that the development of DS systems requires compared to the development of conventional local simulation (LS) systems. In this paper we introduce SimArch, a layered architecture that eases the development of DS systems by enabling simulation developers to effortlessly obtain a DS system or derive a DS system from the equivalent LS one. A reference model is used throughout the paper to illustrate the use of SimArch in the development of DS systems and to prove how the DS development effort is lowered down with respect to the use of a conventional DS environment

Business Process Simulation on Procedural Graphical Process Models

“…The simulation approach suggested by Bocciarrelli et al, that utilizes the BPMN extension PyBPM, develops and refines a business process simulator for performing the simulation step (Bocciarelli et al 2012(Bocciarelli et al , 2014a. The simulation code as result of transforming a BPMN 2.0 model is executed in a research prototype built on top of a layered software architecture called SimArch that provides a general-purpose and event-based simulation infrastructure for distributed discrete event simulation (Gianni et al 2011). Antonacci et al (2016) build on the approach suggested in Bocciarelli et al (2014a, b, c) and propose to perform simulation by executing eBPMN simulation code in a research prototype, also built on top of SimArch.…”

A Service-in-the-Loop Approach for Business Process Simulation Based on Microservices

“…The eBPMN language has been built on top of SimArch (Gianni et al 2011), a layered software architecture that provides an event-driven simulation engine to execute simulation models in either local or distributed simulation environments. eBPMN consists of a set of Java-based primitives that implement the execution semantics of BPMN constructs.…”

Model-driven performance prediction of HLA-based distributed simulation systems

“…As afore mentioned, we restrict our analysis to the IEEE HLA Standard and to the case of conservative execution using DS implementation technologies in which only safe events are processed, such as the SimArch technology (https://sites.google.com/site/simulationarchitecture/simarch) (Gianni et al 2011). …”

“…In Step 2, we have used the above mentioned SimArch technology for the rapid prototyping of the DS model (Gianni et al 2011). At…”

“…These capabilities can be often achieved by Distributed Simulation (DS) approaches, which overcome the limitations of the local approaches by running loosely coupled partitions of the simulators over an internetworked set of hosts. However, DS approaches require substantial technical know-how and a considerable development effort for implementing the DS system (Gianni et al 2011). Moreover, a DS may not necessarily yield reduced execution times with respect to a local simulation, as the synchronizations and communications over the network can become the bottleneck of the DS system.…”