An Object-Oriented XML Description Specification for Scenario Entity

As an important part of simulation system, simulation scenario provides the initial drive for the running of the simulation system. With the characteristics of hierarchy, flexibility and platform-independence, XML (Extensible Markup Language) has become a good choice to describe the simulation scenario. The simulation scenario, which can be understood by object-oriented DES (discrete event simulation) platform, such as YH-SUPE (Yin He Simulation Utilities for Parallel Environment), ought to meet two needs. First, a scenario entity can be marked and distinguished according to the class of the simulation object included in. Second, a simulation object and its events should be encapsulated in the same scenario entity. However, the existing simulation scenario description specifications cannot meet our needs, for they are mainly platform-dependent and have difficulties to realize the encapsulation of simulation object and simulation object event. To address the problem, this paper proposes an object-oriented scenario entity description specification named SSBTM (Scenario Specification Based on Type Matching). By means of adding mark fields and action attribute parameters, simulation objects and simulation object events can be marked uniquely. Experiments prove that SSBTM can be successfully applied to generate the header files of DES platforms, and it greatly reduces the heavy work from simulation scenario to header files' codes.