An aspect-oriented approach to large-scale urban simulations

Within the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) field, a major challenge that lies ahead is integrating massively complex urban simulations. The urban environment is a multifaceted model with many components, such as transportation, land use, and water and power distribution. To produce a high fidelity simulation of a city, all components should interact as they do in the real world. Furthermore, an urban simulation should be within an ecosystem of cities, states, and nations. This study presents an aspect-oriented approach for designing distributed simulations that achieves 2 goals: 1) enables M&S experts to focus on the simulation, not on the platform or on interoperability; and 2) is scalable in terms of simulated entities and models. A middleware called Urban Simulation Platform is proposed, using an aspect-oriented approach to interface between the well known High Level Architecture interoperability standard and the traditional simulation design.