TOWARDS A COMPONENT-ORIENTED DESIGN OF MODELING AND SIMULATION TOOLS

Over the last years component technology has deeply penetrated the area of computer simulation. As a result a new research field has been initiated, which roughly can be divided up into the following two sub-areas: component-oriented development of simulation models and component-oriented development of modeling and simulation (M&S) tools. Most research activities today focus on the development of component-oriented simulation models. For that purpose a global standard called High Level Architecture (HLA) was adopted by the US Department of Defense. Component-oriented development of M&S tools however has been neglected for the most part. This is a very unsatisfying situation because many M&S tools still have a monolithical software design which is difficult to maintain and to extend and which doesn't correspond any more with the modern distributed Web-centered technologies of today. The main focus of this paper will be on a hybrid integration approach for M&S tool components being a combination of loose documentbased and tight invocation-based integration concepts. Concerning this, we report about the current research work on a pragmatic XML-based model interchange format for High-Level Petri Nets and we elaborate on the design of powerful experimentation components and their integration into M&S tools.