CADIS: Aspect-Oriented architecture for collaborative modeling and simulation

The development of large and complex simulated models often requires teams to collaborate. One approach is to break a large model into independently developed partial models that, when combined, capture the overall behavior. However, maintaining consistent world state across independently developed simulations is a challenge. In this paper, we introduce the Collaborative Aspect-Oriented Distributed Interactive Simulation (CADIS) architecture and development platform. CADIS embodies a new paradigm for integrating independently developed time-discrete partial models and simulations, focusing on transparently maintaining synchronized shared state. Data is pulled and instantiated in the beginning of each time step, and pushed at the end of each time step. An urban simulation is used to demonstrate CADIS capabilities and performance. We show how simple optimizations can bring the performance of the framework to acceptable levels, making CADIS a viable modeling and simulation methodology supporting separation of concerns.