Design considerations for M&S software

• Published in: Winter Simulation Conference pp. 944 - 955
• Main Authors: Dalle, Olivier, Ribault, Judicaël, Himmelspach, Jan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Winter Simulation Conference 13.12.2009
• Series: ACM Conferences
• ISBN: 9781424457717; 1424457718
• DOI: 10.5555/1995456.1995592

The development of M&S products often seems to be driven by need: people start coding because they are interested in either a concrete simulation study, or they are interested in a (single) research subject of M&S methodology. We claim that discussing, designing, developing, and comparing M&S products should be based on software engineering concepts. We shortly introduce some of these engineering concepts and discuss how these relate to the M&S domain. By describing two examples, OSA and JAMES II, we illustrate that reuse might play an important role in the development of high quality M&S products as the examples allow reuse on the level of models and scenarios, on the level of "simulation studies", of algorithms (e.g., reuse of event queues, random number generators), across hardware architectures/operating systems, and of analysis tools.