On the Interoperability of DEVS components: On-Line vs. Off-Line Strategies

During the last years, the DEVS community provides many contributions towards the realization of a world-wide platform for collaborative Modeling & Simulation. The goal of such a platform would be to enable the sharing and reuse of models between scientists, as well as the seamless simulation of distributed and heterogeneous models. Therefore, one of the major research fields is the definition of architectures for integrating heterogeneous DEVS components, meaning simulators and/or models written in different frameworks and programming languages. In this work, we present three different strategies for providing such interoperability between DEVS components. The first focuses on standardizing exchanges between simulators, and has been explored in previous works. The two others strategies are more prospective; in keeping with Model-Driven Engineering, they place the model at the center of their architecture and make extensive use of model transformations. To make this possible, we defined a platform and language-independent format for describing and sharing DEVS models, called DEVS Markup Language

Activity Regions for the Specication of Discrete Event Systems

International audienceThe common view on modeling and simulation of dynamic systems is to focus on the specification of the state of the system and its transition function. Although some interesting challenges remain to efficiently and elegantly support this view, we consider in this paper that this problem is solved. Instead, we propose here to focus on a new point of view on dynamic system specifications: the activity exhibited by their discrete event simulation. We believe that such a viewpoint introduces a new way for analyzing, modeling and simulating systems. We first start with the definition of the key notion of activity for the specification of a specific class of dynamic system, namely discrete event systems. Then, we refine this notion to characterize activity regions in time, in space, in states and in hierarchical component-based models. Examples are given to illustrate and stress the importance of this notion

Refounding of Activity Concept ? Towards a Federative Paradigm for Modeling and Simulation

Journal : Simulation, Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation InternationalInternational audienceCurrently, the widely used notion of activity is increasingly present in computer science. However, because this notion is used in specific contexts, it becomes vague. Here, the notion of activity is scrutinized in various contexts and, accord-ingly, put in perspective. It is discussed through four scientific disciplines: computer science, biology, economics, and epis-temology. The definition of activity usually used in simulation is extended to new qualitative and quantitative definitions. In computer science, biology and economics disciplines, the new simulation activity definition is first applied critically. Then, activity is discussed generally. In epistemology, activity is discussed, in a prospective way, as a possible framework in models of human beliefs and knowledge

Application de l'ingénierie dirigée par les modèles et de la métaprogrammation à la modélisation & simulation DEVS

The multiplication of software environments supporting DEVS Modeling & Simulation is becoming a hindrance to scientific collaboration. Indeed, the use of disparate tools in the community makes the exchange, reuse and comparison of models very difficult, preventing practitioners from building on previous works to devise models of ever-increasing complexity. Tool interoperability is not the only issue raised by the need for models of higher and higher complexity. As models grow, their development becomes more error-prone, and their simulation becomes more resource-consuming. Consequently, it is necessary to devise techniques for improving simulators performance and for providing thorough model verification to assist the practitioner during model design. In this thesis, we propose two innovative approaches for DEVS Modeling & Simulation that tackle the aforementioned issues. The first contribution described in this document is a model-driven environment for modeling systems with the DEVS formalism, named SimStudio. This environment relies on Model-Driven Engineering to provide a high-level framework where practitioners can create, edit and visualize models, and automatically generate multiple artifacts, most notably model specifications compatible with various DEVS simulators. The core of SimStudio is a platform-independent metamodel of the DEVS formalism, which provides a pivot format for DEVS models. Based on this metamodel, we developed several model verification features as well as many model transformations that can be used to automatically generate documentation, diagrams or code targeting various DEVS platforms. Thus, SimStudio gives a proof of concept of the integration capabilities that a DEVS standard would provide; as a matter of fact, the metamodel presented in this thesis could possibly serve as a basis for such a standard. The second contribution of this thesis is DEVS-MetaSimulator (DEVS-MS), a DEVS library relying on metaprogramming to generate simulation executables that are specialized and optimized for the model they handle. To do so, the library performs many computations during compilation, resulting in a simulation code where most overhead have been eliminated. The tests we conducted showed that the generated programs were very efficient, but the performance gain is not the only feature of DEVS-MS. Indeed, through metaprogramming, DEVS-MS can also assert the correctness of models by verifying model characteristics at compile-time, detecting and reporting modeling errors very early in the development cycle and with better confidence than what could be achieved with classical testing.La multiplication des environnements logiciels pour la Modélisation & Simulation DEVS pose un problème de collaboration à la communauté scientifique. En effet, l'utilisation d'outils disparates rend l'échange, la réutilisation et la comparaison de modèles très difficiles, empêchant les scientifiques de s'appuyer sur des travaux précédents pour construire leurs modèles. L'interopérabilité des outils n'est pas le seul problème soulevé par le besoin de modèles toujours plus complexes. Au fur et à mesure que les modèles grossissent, leur développement devient plus difficile, notamment en termes de détection des erreurs de conception. D'autre part, la simulation de ces modèles demande de plus en plus de ressources. Par conséquent, il est nécessaire de concevoir des techniques pour améliorer la performance des simulateurs et pour fournir des fonctionnalités de vérification de modèle afin d'assister les scientifiques dans la conception de leurs modèles. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons deux approches innovantes pour la M&S DEVS qui s'attaquent aux problèmes susmentionnés. La première contribution décrite dans ce document est un environnement basé sur les modèles pour modéliser des systèmes avec le formalisme DEVS, intitulé SimStudio. Cet environnement repose sur l'Ingénierie Dirigée par les Modèles pour fournir un cadriciel de haut niveau dans lequel les scientifiques peuvent créer, éditer et visualiser des modèles, et générer automatiquement un ensemble d’artefacts, notamment des spécifications de modèles compatibles avec différents simulateurs DEVS. Le noyau de SimStudio est un métamodèle de DEVS, indépendant de toute plateforme, qui fournit un format pivot pour la représentation des modèles DEVS. En se basant sur ce métamodèle, nous avons développé plusieurs fonctionnalités de vérification de modèle ainsi que plusieurs transformations de modèle pouvant être utilisées pour générer automatiquement de la documentation, des diagrammes ou du code ciblant diverses plateformes DEVS. Ainsi, SimStudio fournit une preuve de concept des capacités d’intégration qu’un standard DEVS pourrait fournir ; en fait, le métamodèle présenté dans cette thèse pourrait potentiellement servir de base de réflexion pour un tel standard. La seconde contribution de cette thèse est DEVS-MetaSimulateur (DEVS-MS), une bibliothèque DEVS qui utilise la métaprogrammation pour générer des exécutables de simulation spécialisés et optimisés pour le modèle qu’ils traitent. Pour ce faire, la bibliothèque effectue un grand nombre d’opérations durant la compilation, résultant en un code de simulation où une grande partie de l’overhead de simulation a été éliminé. Les tests que nous avons effectués ont montré que les programmes générés étaient très efficaces, mais le gain de performance n’est pas la seule caractéristique intéressante de DEVS-MS. En effet, grâce à la métaprogrammation, DEVS-MS peut également partiellement vérifier à la compilation que les modèles sont corrects, c’est-à-dire que leurs caractéristiques sont bien conformes au formalisme DEVS. Les erreurs de modélisation sont ainsi détectées et signalées très tôt dans le cycle de développement, et avec un taux de détection bien meilleur que ne le permettrait des tests classiques

Enhancing DEVS Simulation through Template Metaprogramming

For several years, the DEVS community has been developing many tools for simulating DEVS models, ranging from local sequential to massively distributed and parallel simulation. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to local DEVS simulation. By using template metaprogramming, we developed the DEVS-MetaSimulator (DEVS-MS); instead of proposing one simulator meant to be used with every DEVS models, our library provides several metaclasses defining families of simulators. This way, each simulator instantiation is really specialized for a particular model. Doing so, we increase the detection of errors at compile-time, and we greatly reduce the execution time by removing several runtime computations that are instead performed by the compiler

SimStudio : une Infrastructure pour la Modélisation, la Simulation et l'Analyse de Systèmes Dynamiques Complexes

SimStudio is a Modeling & Simulation framework based on the DEVS formalism (Discrete EVent Systems Specification). SimStudio architecture aims at integrating in a single platform tools for modeling, simulation, analysis and collaboration, by proposing model transformation features (code generation, among others) in order to smooth the modeling and simulation cycle. To achieve this, SimStudio is built upon the DEVS formalism, recognize by many as a "universal" simulation formalism, and upon a unifying language for representing DEVS models. Models are at the heart of the infrastructure we propose, in line with the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, at the boundary between software engineering and simulation