Service-Oriented Simulation Framework: An Overview and Unifying Methodology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unifying three-dimensional reference model for service-oriented simulation, providing a comprehensive overview and comparison of existing frameworks to guide future research and development in the field.

Contribution

It proposes a novel reference model for service-oriented simulation and conducts a comprehensive survey and comparison of existing frameworks using this model.

Findings

The model helps identify strengths and gaps in current frameworks.

Survey covers formalism-based, model-driven, and interoperability protocols.

Highlights future research directions in service-oriented simulation.

Abstract

The prevailing net-centric environment demands and enables modeling and simulation to combine efforts from numerous disciplines. Software techniques and methodology, in particular service-oriented architecture, provide such an opportunity. Service-oriented simulation has been an emerging paradigm following on from object- and process-oriented methods. However, the ad-hoc frameworks proposed so far generally focus on specific domains or systems and each has its pros and cons. They are capable of addressing different issues within service-oriented simulation from different viewpoints. It is increasingly important to describe and evaluate the progress of numerous frameworks. In this paper, we propose a novel three-dimensional reference model for a service-oriented simulation paradigm. The model can be used as a guideline or an analytic means to find the potential and possible future directions of the current simulation frameworks. In particular, the model inspects the crossover between the disciplines of modeling and simulation, service-orientation, and software/systems engineering. Based on the model, we present a comprehensive survey on several classical service-oriented simulation frameworks, including formalism-based, model-driven, interoperability protocol based, eXtensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF), and Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) based frameworks etc. The comparison of these frameworks is also performed. Finally the significance both in academia and practice are presented and future directions are pointed out.