Investigation of Versatile Datatypes for Representing Time in Discrete Event Simulation

Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) is a technique in which the simulation engine plays a history following a chronology of events in which the processing of each event takes place at discrete points of a continuous timeline. The simulator must interact actively with time variables for reproducing the chronology of events over positive real numbers, which is usually represented by approximated datatypes as floating-point. Nevertheless, the approximation made by commonly used datatypes in simulations can affect the timeline, preventing the generation of correct results. To overcome this problem, we present two new versatile datatypes to represent time variables in DES. These new datatypes provide a wider range of numbers reducing approximation errors, and if an error occurs, the simulation user is notified. To test our datatypes, we perform an empirical evaluation in order to compare their performance.