Simulation Model Reuse Theory And Approaches With Heterogeneous Integration Support

Simulation has been used to analyze, demonstrate and develop complex systems more and more deeply and extensively. The importance of reusing the existent and future simulation resources has drawn attentions of various application domains. The feasibility to build new simulations based on legacy goes up continually, and the advantages in efficiency and quality when building on reuse than from scratch have been commonly recognized. As a result, the composition and reuse of simulation resources has been one of the hottest topics in complex system, especially weapon systems and military simulation areas.Being the most important simulation resources, simulation models deserve the most exigent requirement to reuse. Since simulation models are related to application problems, the reusability of the same simulation model in different simulations is difficult to evaluate, and for this reason, the reuse of simulation models than of other simulation resources is of much more difficulty to come to reality. The analysis of current relevant research works shows that the systematic research on theory of simulation model reuse, whose key is to evaluate models' reusability, is still devoid, and various current approaches to reuse lack theory's guidance commonly. To this extent, simulation model reuse has been one of the most urgent problems to be solved.This dissertation makes missile general design as its application background. There are two main problems in missile general design when building system level simulations, one is simulation model reuse and the other is heterogeneous model integration. According to these problems, this dissertation expands its content in several correlative directions, including theory and approaches of simulation model reuse, methods and specifications of simulation model representation, simulation model mapping and transformation technologies, heterogeneous simulation model integration, etc. The original works include:(1) Several key theoretic problems for simulation model reuse are researched systemically. After analyzing the complexities of simulation model reuse, the author proposes a reuse-oriented M&S concept framework that introduces a key component called context. Based on the formal given concept system of simulation model reusability, the reusability evaluation method is detailed. Also detailed are several approaches to increase reusability of simulation models.(2) Current simulation model reuse approaches are categorized and compared. The analysis result is that the reuse approach based on standard model specification (RBSMS) shows better reusability support. According to the requirement of heterogeneous simulation model integration in missile general design simulation, the author presents a concrete approach to simulation model reuse with heterogeneous integration support, which borrows the merits of RBSMS and can support heterogeneous simulation model integration in both representation layer and interface layer. (3) The shortages of current representation methods when representing reusable simulation model are summarized. Then the author proposes a metamodel-based method for reusable simulation model representation, and the reusable simulation model's metamodel representation specification named as Common Meta Model (CMM) is given using OMG's Meta Object Facility (MOF). To prove CMM's representation capability and demostrate how to transform a legacy simulation model described using some explicit formalism to its reusable CMM representation, the DEVS formalism are mapped to CMM, and the transformation from DEVS model to CMM model is modeled using OMG's Query/View/Transformation (QVT) standard. Thereinto a MOF-based DEVS metamodel is built to support aforementioned mapping.(4) Based on the service concept, the service relations between various roles in simulation systems are analyzed. Then a reusable simulation model's interface framework specifications, which include simulation model service specifications and simulation framework service specifications, are detailed formally. As a protocol of M&S, the interface framework specifications prescribe the specification of a simulation implementation model and the specification of a simulation framework supporting reuse.(5) According to the reuse and heterogeneous integration requirement in missile general design simulations, the author develops a simulation framework prototype with reuse support, named as SimKit. The theory of this dissertation is demonstrated by an example of reuse-based strategy missile breaking through NMD defense system simulation.The main contributions of this dissertation include:·The reuse-oriented M&S concept framework, which introduces an additional context component to model than the classical and can provide guide for the reuse-oriented modeling; The formal definition of simulation model reusability concept system and the algorithm to evaluate reusability, which can support the reuse-based simulation.·A concrete simulation model reuse approach with heterogeneous integration support, which provides a simulation model specification that can support heterogeneous simulation model integration in both representation and interface layers.·The metamodel-based method for simulation model representation;·The MOF-based reusable simulation model representation specification, named as CMM; The QVT-based DEVS-CMM transformation model.The research topics of this dissertation belong to the fundamental M&S theory category. Above contributions can advance the system simulation methodology and composable simulation theory, and promote complex weapon systems' demonstration and design simulation.