SHF: Small: An Aspect-Oriented Approach to Large-Scale Urban Simulations

SHF：小型：大规模城市模拟的面向方面的方法

• 批准号: 1526593
• 负责人: Cristina Lopes
• 金额: $ 46.5万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2018-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1526593&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Aspect; Oriented; Approach; SHF; Small; Aspect; Oriented; Approach

Population, environmental, and technological changes are reshaping the infrastructure of our urban environments, and will be a major focus of attention in the near future. With the advent of alternative energy and the Internet of Things, there is suddenly a plethora of new technologies that will require major restructuring of cities. In order to establish sound public policies, all these new technologies can greatly benefit from urban simulations, to measure their impact on the city and on the people before the policies are defined. Large-scale urban simulations tend to be too large and complex to fit a single machine's resources and a single group's expertise. As such, distributed and decentralized urban simulations are a desirable technology to develop. Unfortunately, distributed simulations are still rarely used (except in military applications). Developing distributed simulations is much harder than developing non-distributed ones, and requires a much higher level of software engineering expertise, which usually modeling and simulation experts do not have. The difficulties have been well-known by researchers and engineers, and over the years there have been a few efforts to address them. One of the most important efforts was the development of the High Level Architecture (HLA) standard. The adoption of HLA in practice, however, has been very slow. Surveys suggest that domain-specific adaptors and middleware could help bridge the technical gap in software knowledge. The use of appropriate software engineering concepts and theories can greatly reduce the technical complexity of developing such middleware, and make HLA accessible to a much wider audience, including scientists.The main objective of this proposal is to investigate whether the use of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) concepts will help overcome the engineering challenges faced by distributed simulation systems. Introduced in 1997 by Kiczales, Lopes et. al, AOP put forward a model of system decomposition that encompasses a base functional decomposition as well as one or more orthogonal ones that cut across the base and each other. There are many similarities between the concept of aspect (as given by AOP) and the general concept of aspect of a city that urban planning researchers routinely use. All these aspects are conceptually distinct, but interact with each other over essentially the same objects of simulation, the city and its coordinate system. There are many unknown variables in applying the AOP paradigm to the simulation field. For instance, if simulators are divided by aspects, there is a high chance that urban entities such as individuals, vehicles, and buildings, will be common to multiple simulators. The HLA standard enforces that an attribute of an object can be owned (i.e. read and write permission) by any simulator, but only by one simulator. Thus multiple aspects of the same object will need to coexist, but as different objects. Consistency and performance become issues in maintaining separate versions of what is essentially the same entity. Determining how to maintain a semantic interoperability between aspects would solve one of the major issues with distributed simulations. If AOP proves to be a good fit for distributed simulations, this work can have a tremendous influence on the accessibility of distributed simulations for a large number of modeling and simulation experts, therefore also having a potential impact on policy making, wherever modeling and simulation is used ? in science, logistics, social behavioral, transportation management, health, and land to mention only some examples.

人口，环境和技术变化正在重塑我们的城市环境的基础设施，并将在不久的将来成为关注的重点。随着替代能源和物联网的出现，突然有大量的新技术需要重大重组城市。为了制定合理的公共政策，所有这些新技术都可以从城市模拟中受益匪浅，以衡量其对城市和对人民的影响，然后再定义政策。大规模的城市模拟往往太大且复杂，无法适合单个机器的资源和单个组的专业知识。因此，分布式和分散的城市模拟是一项理想的技术。不幸的是，分布式模拟仍然很少使用（在军事应用中除外）。开发分布式仿真要比开发非分布的模拟要困难得多，并且需要更高水平的软件工程专业知识，而软件工程专业知识通常没有建模和仿真专家。研究人员和工程师众所周知，这些困难已经众所周知，多年来，已经做出了一些努力来解决这些问题。最重要的努力之一是开发高级体系结构（HLA）标准。但是，实践中HLA的采用非常缓慢。调查表明，特定领域的适配器和中间件可以帮助弥合软件知识中的技术差距。使用适当的软件工程概念和理论可以大大降低开发这种中间件的技术复杂性，并使包括科学家在内的更多受众群体可以使用HLA。该提案的主要目的是调查使用面向方面的编程（AOP）概念是否有助于克服分布式模拟系统面临的工程挑战。 Lopes等于1997年由Kiczales推出。 AL，AOP提出了一个系统分解模型，该模型涵盖了基础功能分解以及一个或多个跨基座和彼此切割的正交分解模型。各个方面的概念（由AOP给出）与城市规划研究人员通常使用的城市的一般概念之间有许多相似之处。所有这些方面在概念上都是不同的，但是在基本上与模拟，城市及其坐标系统的对象相互互动。将AOP范式应用于模拟字段时，有许多未知的变量。例如，如果模拟器被各个方面划分，那么多个模拟器等人，车辆和建筑物等城市实体很有可能是常见的。 HLA标准可以强制执行任何模拟器可以拥有对象的属性（即读取和写入权限），但只能由一个模拟器拥有。因此，同一对象的多个方面将需要共存，但作为不同的对象。一致性和性能成为维护本质上相同实体的单独版本的问题。确定如何保持各个方面之间的语义互操作性将解决分布式模拟的主要问题之一。如果AOP被证明非常适合分布式模拟，那么这项工作可能会对大量建模和仿真专家的分布式模拟的可访问性产生巨大影响，因此，无论在任何何处使用建模和模拟，都会对制定政策制定产生潜在的影响？在科学，物流，社会行为，运输管理，健康和土地上仅提及一些例子。