A Web Services-Based Distributed Simulation Architecture for Hierarchical DEVS Models

The Discrete Event Systems Specification (DEVS) formalism specifies a discrete event system in a hierarchical, modular form. This paper presents a web-services-based distributed simulation architecture for DEVS models, named as DEVSCluster-WS. DEVSCluster-WS is actually an enhanced version of DEVSCluster by employing the web services technology, thereby retaining the advantages of the non-hierarchical distributed simulation compared to the previous hierarchical distributed simulations. By employing the web services technologies, it describes models by WSDL and utilizes SOAP and XML for inter-node communication. Due to the standardized nature of the web service technology, DEVSCluster-WS can effectively be embedded in the Internet without adhering to specific vendors and languages. To show the effectiveness of DEVSCluster-WS, we realize it in Visual C++ and SOAPToolkit, and conduct a benchmark simulation for a large-scale logistics system. We compare the performance of DEVSCluster-WS with DEVSCluster-MPI, the MPI-based implementation of DEVSCluster. The performance result shows that the proposed architecture works correctly and could achieve tolerable performance.

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