A translator approach for distributed earthquake engineering hybrid simulation across heterogeneous environments

This paper proposes a solution, called the Translator approach, to allow two different earthquake engineering hybrid simulation environments to communicate and collaborate with each other for a distributed hybrid simulation with minimal modification needed in either environment. By using a Translator module that is designed and implemented to translate messages between the two environments, all the software modules of the two environments can remain intact but exchange messages for simulation collaboration. A distributed hybrid simulation across a US system called UI-SimCor and a Taiwanese system called NCREE-ISEEdb was conducted to validate the approach and demonstrate the feasibility of the Translator approach. In addition, the impact of the Translator module on the runtime efficiency of the simulation was investigated and found to be minimal (about 3% time increase).