Linking spatially explicit parallel continuous and discrete models

The paper advocates the use of mobile agents for linking simulations running on different computers. A mobile component approach is proposed to enhance the reusability of existing simulations and to improve the efficiency of component based simulations of complex systems. A basic unit of the mobile component simulation is a simulation server with a communication interface to mobile agents. Each mobile agent links and coordinates a component´s execution. We used this approach to implement a combined Lyme disease simulation. It consists of a partial differential equation based continuous simulation and a parallel discrete event simulation with explicit space representation. The performance of this implementation is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the mobile component approach. In addition, a process-port model of simulation is discussed. Its implementation allows efficient linkage of simulation servers, if they are programmed in a simulation language supporting the process-port model. We finally show that the performance of the mobile component approach could be significantly improved by using compiler techniques to eliminate overhead of communication among simulation servers