OSA: an Open Component-based Architecture for Discrete-event Simulation

This paper describes work in progress to initiate the collaborative development of a new software platform for discrete-event simulation studies, the Open Simulation Architecture (OSA). OSA is primarily intended to be a federating platform for the simulation community: it is designed to favour the integration of new or existing contributions at every level of its architecture. The platform core supports discrete-event simulation engine(s) built on top of the ObjectWeb Consortium's Fractal component model. In OSA, the systems to be simulated are modeled and instrumented using Fractal components. Fractal components offer many advanced and original features, such as multi-programming language support and the ability to share sub-components. In OSA, the event handling is mostly hidden in the controller part of the components, which alleviates noticeably the modeling process, but also ease the replacement of any part of the simulation engine. Apart the simulation engine, OSA aims at integrating useful tools for modeling, developing, experimenting and analysing simulations. For this purpose it relies on the Eclipse development platform and its ability to be extended.