Towards a Distributed Simulation Toolbox for Scilab

Abstract

Scilab is an open-source cross-platform computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. It provides a high-level programming language with hundreds of built-in functions for numerical computation. Additionally, it encompasses Xcos, which is a Causal Block Diagrams-based graphical editor for modeling and simulation of dynamical systems. Thus, it supports model-based simulation. With emerging technologies like cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, smart devices and ambient intelligence, the subject reality (simuland) involves multiple heterogeneous and distributed interacting entities. Hence, the modeling and simulation of these emerging systems is evolving towards constructing distributed simulations where individual models of distributed entities interact with each other via well-defined and agreed interfaces. Although distributed simulation has been widely utilized by mainly defense modeling and simulation community since the 1980s, the combination of distributed simulation with model-based simulation tech-niques for simulating technical systems poses new research challenges. To date, Scilab and Xcos do not con-tain built-in distributed simulation capabilities. This paper first introduces the requirement of distributed model-based simulation and then presents an implementation strategy aligned with the Scilab and the Xcos software architecture.