Collaborative Work in Domain-Specific Discrete Event Simulation Software Development: Fleet Anti-air Defense Simulation Software

Modeing and simulation (M&S) is an important method to evaluate numerous designs and operational concepts for a real-world system. If a system to be modeled is domain-specific, developing the simulation software of the system will require domain knowledge about the system as well as understanding the M&S methodology. This paper describes M&S stakeholders and proposes a collaborative work process in the development of domain-specific simulation software. M&S stakeholders are persons with their own professional knowledge: subject matter experts (SME), domain engineers, M&S engineers, platform engineers, and simulation data analysts. The M&S process consists of eight activities from defining modeling objectives to analyzing simulation data, and diverse M&S stakeholders work together in each activity. The M&S process is applied to develop a real-world M&S software development experience in a military domain. Through the proposed collaborative work process, the capabilities of the M&S stakeholders can be utilized maximally by seamlessly separating yet correlating their works.

I. Introduction

Discrete event modeling can be considered a process of abstract knowledge representation of a real-world system. As a model, the representation should be executable within a simulation environment to analyze the modeled system with respect to modeling objectives. The model can vary according to the modelers' different viewpoints, such as event-oriented, process-oriented, object-oriented, etc. Among them, the object-oriented (OO) approach may be most compatible with a real-world system from the system-theoretic viewpoint of model representation [1]. The DEVS formalism [2], which represents a discrete event system from the system-theoretic viewpoint, is known to be compatible with the OO world view.