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Cloud computing can be a game-changer for computationally intensive tasks like simulations. The computational power of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft is even available to a single researcher. However, the pay-as-you-go cost model of cloud computing influences how cloud-native systems are being built. We transfer these insights to the simulation domain. The major contributions of this paper are twofold: (A) we propose a cloud-native simulation stack and (B) derive expectable software engineering trends for cloud-native simulation services. Our insights are based on systematic mapping studies on cloud-native applications, a review of cloud standards, action research activities with cloud engineering practitioners, and corresponding software prototyping activities. Two major trends have dominated cloud computing over the last 10 years. The size of deployment units has been minimized and corresponding architectural styles prefer more fine-grained service decompositions of independently deployable and horizontally scalable services. We forecast similar trends for cloud-native simulation architectures. These similar trends should make cloud-native simulation services more microservice-like, which are composable but just “simulate one thing well.” However, merely transferring existing simulation models to the cloud can result in significantly higher costs. One critical insight of our (and other) research is that cloud-native systems should follow cloud-native architecture principles to leverage the most out of the pay-as-you-go cost model.

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Scenario development starts with capturing scenarios from the users and leads to the design and the development of the simulation environment to execute these scenarios. This paper proposes a scenario development process adopting a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) perspective. It takes scenario development and the use of scenarios in simulation environment development put forth in IEEE Recommended Practice for Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process (DSEEP) as a starting point. It then constructs a basic vocabulary including the definitions of operational, conceptual, and executable scenarios. Following MDE principles, scenario development is viewed as a series of model transformations. Operational scenarios, mostly defined in a natural language, are first transformed into conceptual scenarios, which conform to a formal metamodel. Then conceptual scenarios can be transformed into executable scenarios specified using a specific scenario definition language. Furthermore, it is also possible to generate the constructs of simulation environment design and development using model transformations. In this regard, a conceptual scenario metamodel is proposed adopting the Base Object Model metamodel as an example. Then this metamodel is used to present the proposed process with a sample operational scenario and conceptual scenario excerpts. Samples are shown how model transformation can be employed for developing a Federation Object Model and an executable scenario file.

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