A scala-based actor-entity architecture for intelligent interactive simulations

Simulator X is a software research platform for intelligent Real-time Interactive Systems. Based on the actor model, it supports fine grained concurrency and parallelism. The architecture uses actors to realize a distributed application state and execution model which is mapped to an object-centered global and coherent world view based on entities. The architecture pays specific attention to the minimize coupling and maximize cohesion software engineering principle. Entities are associated with specific properties. These properties are realized by so called state variables. State variable access is implicitly relayed to individual actors guarding access to them. The underlying asynchronous event mechanism is based on the actors' message passing facility to provide intra- and interprocess communication. It supports typical read/write access as well as change notification and snapshot services. An extensible world interface uses a semantic annotation layer grounded into an ontology to provide a coherent world view of the distributed world state and execution model. The world interface greatly simplifies configurability and the semantic layer provides a solid foundation for incorporation of different Artificial Intelligence components. The system is implemented in Scala using the Java virtual machine. This choice additionally fosters low-level scalability, portability, and reusability. The platform is targeted at Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and computer games.