Investigating patterns for the process-oriented modelling and simulation of space in complex systems

Complex systems modelling and simulation is becoming increasingly important to numerous disciplines. The CoSMoS project aims to produce a unified infrastructure for modelling and simulating all sorts of complex systems, making use of design patterns and the process-oriented programming model. We provide a description of CoSMoS and present a case study into the modelling of space in complex systems. We describe how two models - absolute geometric space and relational network space - can be captured using processoriented techniques, and how our models can be refactored to allow efficient, distributed simulation. We identify a number of design, implementation and refactoring patterns that can be applied to future complex systems modelling problems.