MDE and customization of modeling and simulation web applications

In this paper, we present a model-driven approach to construction of web-based collaborative environments that could be efficiently tailored to modeling and simulation needs of an arbitrary number of M&S application domains. To achieve broad applicability, our approach is based on general concepts and taxonomies in fields of Modeling and Simulation, Distributed Systems, and Collaborative Software. Such stable concepts constitute the collaborative Modeling and online Simulation (cMoS) framework. cMoS provides a general basis for a family of Web-Based M&S applications. Specific M&S applications are supported through customization of the variation points in cMoS. To enable efficient tailoring to specific applications during the operation phase, the variation points are not implicitly hardcoded as traditionally, but are explicitly expressed as models. The use of the resulting models is still limited due to a high barrier of their implementation. This barrier is sought to be amended by model-driven engineering (MDE): models of the variation points are computerized and their implementation is automatically generated. The end result is a model-driven and mostly programming free cMoS system adaptable to new M&S applications through abstract modeling of the variation points. The proposed framework and model-driven construction of a cMoS system are demonstrated. The system customization has been verified for a number of domains: Data Flow Diagrams (DFD), Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS), Process Interaction (PI) and Dynamic Traffic Routing (DTR). A demonstration of the latter is included in this paper. Generic cMoS functionality, such as modeling, collaborative sharing of conceptual models, online simulation and management of shared simulation resources is demonstrated as well.