Enabling large scale and high definition simulation of natural systems with vector models and JDEVS

Abstract

This paper describes a new methodology to enable large scale high resolution environmental simulation. Unlike the vast majority of environmental modeling techniques that split the space into cells, the use of a vector space is proposed here. A phenomena is described by its shape, decomposed in several points that can move using a displacement vector. The shape also has a dynamic structure, as each point can instantiate new point because of a change in the space properties or to obtain a better resolution model. Such vector models are generating less overhead because the phenomena is recomputed only if a part of it is entering into a different space entity with different attributes, using cellular space the model would have been recomputed for each neighboring identical cells. This technique uses the DSDEVS formalism to describe discrete event models with dynamic structure, and is implemented in the JDEVS toolkit also presented.