The architecture of an object base environment for simulation

Abstract

In this chapter, we have presented the design of a parallel object-oriented simulation environment. The environment provides an object-oriented interface that allows the control and the communication aspects of active objects be easily specified. It also allows complex objects be composed easily. Representing the control of each active object as a production system, the environment considers the state space of each object in determining the impact of any change made to the object.

While the idea of rule-based simulation is not new (see, e.g., [282] [387] [608]), our approach converts a large number of active objects into a much smaller set of operations applying to sets of passive objects. As a consequence, common computations can be shared among different objects. Compared to a fully distributed, asynchronous approach, it avoids the problem of managing a large number of active objects when the available physical resources are limited. An alternative object-oriented rule evaluation approach has been also proposed for parallel environments which contain a large number of relatively simple processing elements.

This work is supported in part by the Office of Naval Technology, Code 227, Computer Technology Block Program through the Office of Naval Research ASEE Summer Faculty Research Program.