A Package System for Maintaining Large Model Distributions in VLE Software

Abstract

The Modeling and Simulation (M&S) is becoming a central activity in order to build, study and analyze new systems. To improve activities of M&S, we need to develop collaborative technologies. In this context, we develop the application software Virtual Laboratory Environment (VLE) to model, simulate and analyze dynamic systems. VLE is based on the Discrete Event System specification (DEVS) formalism, a widely recognized specification for modeling and simulating discrete events systems. The main features of the DEVS formalism are a modular and hierarchical approach of the M&S and a relative simplicity to develop the simulation algorithms. Researchers and engineers from different comunities used VLE to develop and study models. However, the modelers need to share source code in order to reuse, couple and combine models. It is not sufficient because they are not helped for maintenance and version upgrades issues. In this paper we present a package system manager that greatly helps modelers to publish source code, binary code, exchange models, data and software application in VLE.