A microservice-based approach for fine-grained simulation in msaas platforms

M&S as a Service (MSaaS) is an increasingly adopted paradigm that brings the benefits of service-oriented architectures and cloud computing into the M&S field. The design and implementation of MSaaS platforms typically address the provision of coarse-grained M&S services, which offer the user easy access and orchestration of M&S components consisting of entire environments, applications and/or tools. This paper introduces an approach to the provision of fine-grained M&S services, which are defined by use of a microservice-based architecture, according to which applications are developed as a suite of small-sized services. The proposed approach extends an already available MSaaS platform, named SOASim. The paper shows how the integration and mutual use of fine-grained and coarse-grained services (e.g., modeling services, transformation services, presentation services etc.) significantly enhance the benefits of SOASim. An example application to the microservice-based setup of a discrete event simulation is used to describe and discuss the proposed approach.