Setting up Simulation Experiments with SESSL

Setting up simulation experiments is hard, even more so as simulation systems usually offer only custom interfaces for this task (e.g., a graphical user interface or a programming interface). This steepens the learning curve for experimenters, who have to get accustomed with the idiosyncrasy of each simulation system they want to experiment with. It also makes cross-validation experiments between simulation systems cumbersome, since the same experiment needs to be set up for each system from scratch. In the following, we give a brief overview of SESSL, a domain-specific language for simulation experiments. SESSL addresses these issues by providing a common interface to set up simulation experiments in a more declarative manner, i.e., specifying what to do, not how to do it. Therefore, SESSL can also be used for documenting and reproducing simulation experiments. 1 SESSL: SIMULATION EXPERIMENT SPECIFICATION VIA A SCALA LAYER SESSL is an embedded domain-specific language based on the SCALA programming language (Odersky, Spoon, and Venners 2011), i.e., it provides a SCALA-based programming interface that has ”‘[...] the feel of a custom language [...]” ’ (Fowler 2010). We tried to keep the interface of SESSL as general as possible, so that it can be used to configure various kinds of simulation experiments for various kinds o