Decoupling visualisation for better DEVS-based simulation applications

ABSTRACT

Simulation visualisation is an effective way of understanding and communicating complex systems and processes. Among other advantages, it increases model transparency and intelligibility for all categories of users including non-experts, and it can be used by modellers as a tool to debug models in development. However, simulation visualisation is often tightly coupled to specific simulators, and, therefore, there is no way to reuse visualisation tools efficiently. Here, we present a specification that can be used to decouple visualisation engines from simulators. The specification also considers storage optimisation to support web-based simulation applications. We also present an implementation that supports the web-based representation and animation of outputs issued from simulators based on the discrete event system specification (DEVS) and Petri Nets.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoupled visualisation
• visualisation interoperability
• simulation environment

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Compute Canada for providing access to their Arbutus cloud-based infrastructure that allowed us to develop and test an implementation of the work we presented. The research was partially funded by NSERC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSERC - Canada.