A software architecture to ease the development of distributed simulation systems

The simulation of modern systems may require an amount of computational resources that might not be available on a single host. Distributed simulation (DS) provides an effective way to scale up for the increased computational requirements. However, using existing DS environments remains the main obstacle to the wide adoption of DS systems, because of their inherent complexity. This complexity can be quantitatively shown by the extra effort that the development of DS systems requires compared to the development of conventional local simulation (LS) systems. In this paper we introduce SimArch, a layered architecture that eases the development of DS systems by enabling simulation developers to effortlessly obtain a DS system or derive a DS system from the equivalent LS one. A reference model is used throughout the paper to illustrate the use of SimArch in the development of DS systems and to prove how the DS development effort is lowered down with respect to the use of a conventional DS environment.