Co-simulation is a promising approach for the modelling and simulation of complex systems, that makes use of mature simulation tools in the respective domains. It has been applied in wildly different domains, oftentimes without a comprehensive study of the impact to the simulation results. As a consequence, over the recent years, researchers have set out to understand the essential challenges arising from the application of this technique. This paper complements the existing surveys in that the social and empirical aspects were addressed. More than 50 experts participated in a two-stage Delphi study to determine current challenges, research needs and promising standards and tools. Furthermore, an analysis of the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of co-simulation utilizing the analytic hierarchy process resulting in a SWOT-AHP analysis is presented. The empirical results of this study show that experts consider the FMI standard to be the most promising standard for continuous time, discrete event and hybrid co-simulation. The results of the SWOT-AHP analysis indicate that factors related to strengths and opportunities predominate.
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A trend across most areas where simulation-driven development is used is the ever increasing size and complexity of the systems under consideration, pushing established methods of modeling and simulation towards their limits. This paper complements existing surveys on large-scale modeling and simulation of physical systems by conducting expert surveys. We conducted a two-stage empirical survey in order to investigate research needs, current challenges as well as promising modeling and simulation paradigms. Furthermore, we applied the analytic hierarchy process method to prioritise the strengths and weakness of different modeling paradigms. The results of this study show that experts consider acausal modeling techniques to be suitable for modeling large scale systems, while causal techniques are considered less suitable.
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