Development of an open-source Discrete Event Simulation cloud enabled platform

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is traditionally one of the most popular operation research techniques. Nevertheless, organizations, and especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), are often reluctant to invest in DES projects. The lack of flexibility, high cost of developing and maintaining DES models, the high volume of data that these need in order to provide valid results and the difficulty in embedding them in real time problems, are some of the problems that deter organizations from adopting DES based solutions. DREAM is an FP7 project with the aim to develop an Open Source (OS) platform, which will confront the above issues. The DREAM architecture consists of three cloud enabled modules, a semantic free Simulation Engine (SE), a Knowledge Extraction (KE) tool and a customizable web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI). We present how these components cooperate and how an advanced user can manipulate them to develop tailored solutions for companies.