Abstract

This paper advocates the use of mobile agents for linking simulations running on different computers. A Mobile Component approach is proposed to enhance reusability of existing simulations and to improve efficiency of component based simulations of complex systems. A basic unit of the mobile component simulation is a simulation server with a communication interface to mobile agents. Each mobile agent links and coordinates component's execution. We used this approach to implement a combined Lyme disease simulation. It consists of a partial differential equation based continuous simulation and parallel discrete event simulation with explicit space representation. The performance of this implementation is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the Mobile Component approach. In addition, a process-port model of simulation is discussed. Its implementation allows efficient linkage of simulation servers, if they are programmed in a simulation language supporting the process-port model. We finally show that the performance of the Mobile Component approach could be significantly improved by using compiler techniques to eliminate overhead of communication among simulation servers.

Citations