Motivation
Today's simulation technology still suffers from a lack of software tools that support the planning, execution, and analysis of large-scale experiments. The conceptual separation of models and experiments suggests the development of generic experimentation environments whose functionality can be reused by a large number of modeling and simulation tools.
The Eclipse Way
During the last years, the Java-based open-source project Eclipse has evolved from an integrated development environment to a general tool platform. It provides an appropriate and contemporary architectural framework for application development. One of Eclipse's main advantages is the fact that a large number of useful components already exist that can be reused for conducting simulation studies. We chose Eclipse as basis for an interactive experimentation environment which integrates the functionality of generic experimentation tools previously developed in our group into experimentation support plug-ins.
A Generic Experimentation Framework
The foundation for our experimentation environment is an object-oriented experimentation framework that allows to integrate arbitrary simulators and models. Its architecture builds upon the DISMO system and the CoSim experimentation environment—both developed at the University of Hamburg.
Project Status
Based on our experimentation framework, we have designed several experimentation support plug-ins for the Eclipse platform. The implementation of these plug-ins started as part of a student project in late 2005. As a simulator, our discrete event simulation framework DESMO-J has been integrated.
Future
The current prototype contains only basic experimentation functionality. To make it a mature system, a lot of additional conceptual and implementation work has to be done. However, the source code will be released soon.
In our future work, we will evaluate the utility of our experimentation system in large-scale simulation studies. To prove its generality, we will integrate several simulators based on different world-views; such as the Petri net simulator Renew. We also plan to combine the experimentation plug-ins with graphical modeling tools; thereby realizing an Eclipse-based simulation system.