Should Simulation Products use Software Engineering Techniques or Should they Reuse Products of Software Engineering? -- Part 2

This two-part article addresses the issues concerning the building of new simulation software by either reusing existing general purpose software products and concepts or by writting the simulation software from scratch. The first part, published in the previous issue of the M&S Magazine, described a selected list of existing software that could be used as a basis for building a new product. In this second part, we come back on some of this selected software, and further elaborate on their original concepts and the new perspective they would open if they were applied to a computer simulation software. In particular, we discuss the possibility of splitting a simulation code in many parts using Separation of Concerns techniques; we investigate the potential of sharing the same instance of a component multiple times in a hierarchical component model; and we discuss the perspective of centering the software design on the trial-and-error incremental process instead of a classical development process.