Modelling and simulation-based design of a distributed DEVS simulator

Distributed, discrete-event simulators are typically deployed on different computing and network platforms using different implementation languages. This hampers realistic performance comparisons between simulator implementations. Furthermore, algorithms used are typically only present in code rather than explicitly modeled. This prohibits rigorous analysis and re-use. In this paper, the structure and behavior of a distributed simulator for the DEVS formalism is modeled explicitly, in the DEVS formalism. Simulation of this model of the simulator allows for the quantitative analysis of reliability and performance of different alternative simulator designs. In particular, using a model of a distributed simulator allows one to simulate scenarios such as failures of computational and network resources, which can be hard to realize in reality. We demonstrate our model-based approach by modeling, simulating and ultimately synthesizing a distributed DEVS simulator. Our goal is to achieve fault tolerance whilst optimizing performance.