Efficient Coordination for Distributed Discrete-Event Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to reduce network message overhead in distributed discrete-event systems, specifically within high-level architecture (HLA) frameworks, while maintaining timing accuracy and system correctness.

Contribution

It proposes an efficient coordination approach that minimizes messaging in distributed DE systems, improving performance without sacrificing semantics.

Findings

Significant reduction in network message volume

Maintains discrete-event semantics accurately

Improves efficiency of distributed simulation

Abstract

Timing control while preserving determinism is often a key requirement for ensuring the safety and correctness of distributed cyber-physical systems (CPS). Discrete-event (DE) systems provide a suitable model of computation (MoC) for time-sensitive distributed CPS. The high-level architecture (HLA) is a useful tool for the distributed simulation of DE systems, but its techniques can be adapted for implementing distributed CPS. However, HLA incurs considerable overhead in network messages conveying timing information between the distributed nodes and the centralized run-time infrastructure (RTI). This paper gives a novel approach and implementation that reduces such network messages while preserving DE semantics. An evaluation of our runtime demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces the volume of messages for timing information in HLA.