High performance simulation of devs based large scale cellular space models

Cellular space modeling is becoming an increasingly important modeling paradigm for modeling complex systems with spatial-temporal behaviors. The growing demand for cellular space models has directed researchers to use different modeling formalisms, among which Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) is widely used due to its formal modeling and simulation framework. The increasing complexity of systems to be modeled asks for cellular space models with large number of cells for modeling the systems’ spatial-temporal behavior. Improving simulation performance becomes crucial for simulating large scale cellular space models. In this dissertation, we proposed a framework for improving simulation performance for large scale DEVS-based cellular space models. The framework has a layered structure, which includes modeling, simulation, and network layers corresponding to the DEVS-based modeling and simulation architecture. Based on this framework, we developed methods at each layer to overcome performance issues for simulating large scale cellular space models. Specifically, to increase the runtime and memory efficiency for simulating large number of cells, we applied Dynamic Structure DEVS (DSDEVS) to cellular space modeling and carried out comprehensive performance measurement. DSDEVS improves simulation performance by making the simulation focus only on those active models, and thus be more efficient than when the entire cellular space is loaded. To reduce the number of simulation cycles caused by extensive message passing among cells, we developed a pre-schedule modeling approach that exploits the model behavior for improving simulation performance. At the network layer, we developed a modified time-warp algorithm that supports parallel simulation of DEVS-based cellular space models. The developed methods have been applied to large scale wildfire spread simulations based on the DEVS-FIRE simulation environment and have achieved significant performance results. INDEX WORDS: DEVS, High performance, Cellular space, Dynamic structure, Modeling and simulation, Time warp optimistic, Parallel and distributed computing