The increasing complexity of modern systems makes their design, development, and operation extremely challenging and therefore new systems engineering and modeling and simulation (M&S) methods, techniques, and tools are emerging, also to benefit from distributed simulation environments. In this context, one of the most mature and popular standards for distributed simulation is the IEEE 1516-2010 - Standard for M&S high level architecture (HLA). However, building and maintaining distributed simulations components, based on the IEEE 1516-2010 standard, is still a challenging and effort-consuming task. To ease the development of full-fledged HLA-based simulations, the paper proposes the MONADS method (MOdel-driveN Architecture for Distributed Simulation), which relies on the model-driven systems engineering paradigm. The method takes as input system models specified in Systems Modeling Language, the reference modeling language in the systems engineering field, and produces as output the final code of the corresponding HLA-based distributed simulation through a chain of model-to-model and model-to-text transformations. The obtained simulation code is based on the HLA Development Kit software framework, which has been developed by the SMASH-Lab (System Modeling and Simulation Hub - Laboratory) of the University of Calabria (Italy), in cooperation with the Software, Robotics, and Simulation Division (ER) of NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston (TX, USA). The effectiveness of the method is shown through a case study that concerns a military patrol operation, in which a set of drones are engaged to patrol the border of a military area, in order to prevent both ground and flight attacks from entering the area.
The development of complex systems requires the use of quantitative analysis techniques to allow a designtime evaluation of the system behavior. In this context, distributed simulation (DS) techniques can be effectively introduced to assess whether or not the system satisfies the user requirements. Unfortunately, the development of a DS requires the availability of an IT infrastructure that could not comply with time-to-market requirements and budget constraints. In this respect, this work introduces HLAcloud, a model-driven and cloud-based framework to support both the implementation of a DS system from a SysML specification of the system under study and its execution over a public cloud infrastructure. The proposed approach, which exploits the HLA (High Level Architecture) DS standard, is founded on the use of model transformation techniques to generate both the Java/HLA source code of the DS system and the scripts required to deploy and execute the HLA federation onto the PlanetLab cloud-based infrastructure
Simulation is a key technique for enabling business process analysts to predict the process behavior at design time. However, some issues limit the effectiveness of business process simulation (e.g., lack of simulation know how, costs and difficulties for gathering process data, semantic gap between the business process model and the simulation model). This paper proposes a model-driven method that automates the generation of executable business process simulation code. In order to address the increasing complexity and to take into account the inherent collaborative aspects of modern business processes, the simulation code produced by the proposed method replicates the business process distributed structure (in terms, e.g., of a service-oriented architecture) by including a set of simulation services that are orchestrated into a distributed simulation execution. The characterization of business processes in terms of the required performance properties is introduced through standard BPMN annotations according to a well-defined syntax, thus avoiding the need of additional languages. The implementation of the executable simulation code is based on the eBPMN language, a domain-specific language that preserves the semantic behavior of the original BPMN standard
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