Design and implementation of an XML-based, technology-unified data pipeline for interactive simulation

Providing software that is efficient, flexible, reusable and easy to work with is a hard task for simulation developers. In this paper we propose the use of XML and its related tools (e.g. JAXB, XQuery, XSLT, and Native XML Database) for the implementation of a technology-unified data pipeline targeted to interactive simulation. We introduce a technology-independent conceptual data model as the basis for every simulation framework. We show that XML is a well-suited technology to be used in that context. We propose a data modeling methodology that takes its roots from Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). We also show a sample implementation that uses XML for transmitting data over the entire simulation loop. We thus present our experience in implementing that kind of architecture and discuss how the use of XML and associated technologies help in building a unified and generic data pipeline for interactive simulation.