Visualization and Collaborative Editing of Simulation Models With Heterogeneous Clients: Implemented Into the Simulator D3FACT

Abstract

Today’s simulation software normally has fixed, built-in editing and visualization views adapted to a specific problem domain. Often this monolithic concept prevents collaborative editing altogether. Even with more flexible concepts, editing simulation models with a heterogeneous set of clients is not possible. In this article we describe a flexible concept for collaborative editing of simulation models with heterogeneous clients, such as web-based, desktop and mobile clients. The clients may even show different editing views adapted to the user’s role. The concept we describe in this paper overcomes several problems: First we need to be able to connect and manage a set of heterogeneous clients in the simulation software. The very different user inputs from the connected clients then need to be processed, interpreted and combined to allow editing in a collaborative way for all users. At last we show a prototypical integration of the presented concept into our research platform d3fact.