ON SCALABILITY IN SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Advances in processing power of modern computer hardware allow the analysis of increasingly complex systems by means of simulation. However, many engineering problems such as design optimization problems in the aircraft industry, facility management in the water industry or design problems in the automotive industry have extremely high computational demands. To solve these problems in reasonable time, parallel computing must be utilized. The availability of affordable parallel computing systems in the form of network of workstations or compute clusters as well as the dawn of grid computing and servcice-oriented architectures is beginning to make parallel computing accessable to a broader community. To exploit the total processing power of many CPUs, intelligent, scalable algorithms are required. In this paper, the concept of scalability is examined in the context of parallel simulation software systems and the distributed solution of simulation-based optimization problems.The original publication is available at JAIST Press http://www.jaist.ac.jp/library/jaist-press/index.htmlIFSR 2005 : Proceedings of the First World Congress of the International Federation for Systems Research : The New Roles of Systems Sciences For a Knowledge-based Society : Nov. 14-17, 2088, Kobe, JapanSymposium 3, Session 3 : Intelligent Information Technology and Applications Networks and Agent