Research Article Reusable Component Model Development Approach for Parallel and Distributed Simulation

Copyright © 2014 Feng Zhu et al.This is an open access article distributed under theCreative CommonsAttribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Model reuse is a key issue to be resolved in parallel and distributed simulation at present. However, component models built by different domain experts usually have diversiform interfaces, couple tightly, and bind with simulation platforms closely. As a result, they are difficult to be reused across different simulation platforms and applications. To address the problem, this paper first proposed a reusable component model framework. Based on this framework, then our reusable model development approach is elaborated, which contains two phases: (1) domain experts create simulation computational modules observing three principles to achieve their independence; (2) model developer encapsulates these simulation computational modules with six standard service interfaces to improve their reusability. The case study of a radar model indicates that the model developed using our approach has good reusability and it is easy to be used in different simulation platforms and applications. 1