A CORBA facility for network simulation

• Authors: Chien-Chung Shen
• Venue: WSC '96 Proceedings of the 28th conference on Winter simulation
• Year: 1996

Contemporary software development environments for discrete-event simulation have adopted either a language-based approach or a library-based approach. Although these approaches have advantages such as type checking and optimized code generation provided by the former and familiar programming environments facilitated by the latter, they suffer from the inherent limitations of model portability and interoperability, which may result in inflexible models and higher model development cost. This paper proposes a CORBA discrete-event simulation facility to facilitate portable and interoperable simulation models. The proposed facility is defined by a CORBA IDL interface which defines operations for object definition, inter-object communication and event scheduling. Based on the given IDL interface definition, different vendors could supply different products (at different costs) by using different simulation algorithms, different programming language, or on different operating system or hardware platforms. With respect to the simulation models, they see a consistent interface across all products. The paper presents the simulation facility IDL interface, describes its prototype implementation in C++, and illustrates its usage by a bounded-buffer producer-consumer example.