Building Reusable Simulation Components

In the SimBeans project we apply a component-based software engineering approach to the development of simulation systems and frameworks. Libraries of reusable simulation components have been realized on the basis of the component model JavaBeans for various simulation application domains. The main objective thereby has been to enhance model reusability. Although the system modeling approach provides an underlying foundation for building reusable models, there exist no application-specific patterns and architectures, which define how such libraries of reusable components should be built. In this paper we present an attempt in this direction. We discuss general guidelines for the development of reusable simulation components and present component architectures for various application domains. The architectures have been designed with these guidelines in mind.