An automatic distributed simulation environment

Developing a sequential simulation program is not an easy task. Developing a distributed simulation program is harder than a sequential one because it is necessary to deal with mapping physical processes into logical processes, communication and synchronization problems and learn another simulation language/library. In the literature, several simulation environments can be found but the great number are for sequential simulation, not using all the advantages of a distributed/parallel platform. This paper presents ASDA, an automatic distributed simulation environment that aims at providing several possibilities to users developing a distributed simulation. The automatic word can be understood in three different ways: the environment automatically generates a distributed simulation program code; the environment can automatically choose one distributed simulation approach; and the environment can automatically convert a sequential simulation program into a distributed simulation program using the MRIP (multiple replication in parallel) approach.