Reactive Programming of Simulations in Physics

TL;DR

This paper explores using Reactive Programming to simulate physical systems, highlighting its advantages like logical parallelism and dynamic event management, demonstrated through a Molecular Dynamics implementation in Java.

Contribution

It introduces a Reactive Programming approach tailored for physical system simulations, showcasing its practical application and benefits over traditional methods.

Findings

Reactive Programming enables logical parallelism in simulations.

Dynamic creation and destruction of components are efficiently managed.

The approach is demonstrated with a Java-based Molecular Dynamics system.

Abstract

We consider the Reactive Programming (RP) approach to simulate physical systems. The choice of RP is motivated by the fact that RP genuinely offers logical parallelism, instantaneously broadcast events, and dynamic creation/destruction of parallel components and events. To illustrate our approach, we consider the implementation of a system of Molecular Dynamics, in the context of Java with the Java3D library for 3D visualisation.