Applying simulations: On the importance of the simulation performance

Creating new software or software-intensive systems is still a challenge and far removed from a traditional engineering domain. The increasing size of software deployed in typical systems and the emergence of very large highly distributed systems necessitates additional techniques to assure the systems quality. Using the example of the German automatic toll system we briefly outline a simulation driven development approach: Using simulation models starting with the very early design stages to verify and validate the overall dynamic system behavior throughout the whole development process. In practice the approach depends particularly on the performance of the simulation model: Many simulation runs are necessary while exploring the solution space of a proposed change or while calibrating and optimizing parameters of the simulation models. Starting with an existing model of the German automatic toll system we look at two different possibilities for parallelization - parallelized optimization and the partial transformation of the simulation model to a parallelized implementation.