Simulation Design: Trans-Paradigm Best-Practice from Software Engineering

There are growing initiatives to apply software engineering (SE) best-practice to computational science, which includes simulation. One area where the simulation literature appears to be particularly light is in the overall structural design of simulations, and what architectures and features are valuable for what reasons. (Part of the problem is that parts of this knowledge are abstracted away in simulation toolkits which are often not easily comparable, and have different conceptual aims.) To address this, I outline three key software properties which embody SE best-practices, and then define an ‘idealised’ software architecture for simulation—what SE would call a reference architecture— which strongly exhibits them. I show that this is universal to all simulations (largely because modelling-paradigm-specific detail is encapsulated into a ‘single black box’ layer of functionality) but that simulation toolkits tend to differ in how they map to them; this relates to the aims of the toolkits, which I provide a useful categorisation of. I show that, interestingly, there are several core features of this architecture that are not fully represented in any simulation toolkit that This is a post-print version of the forthcoming journal article with the following citation: Rossiter, S. (Forthcoming). Simulation design: Trans-paradigm best-practice from software engineering. Journal of Artificial Societies & Social Simulation (JASSS) . The definitive published version will be available open access online in its default HTML format (and this text will be updated with the authoritative location when available). This document represents a print-typeset version of the LATEX original (before HTML conversion using the tools available on the JASSS site at http://jasss.so .surrey.a . uk/admin/submit.html). This may therefore be a more print-friendly version. (The JASSS site supports PDF downloads, but these are created directly from the HTML, and thus not typeset as this original.) Because the published version uses a paragraph numbering scheme (with no page numbers), you should use that numbering scheme in any location specific citations.