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

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、环境和技术的变化正在重塑我们城市环境的基础设施，并将成为不久的将来关注的主要焦点。随着替代能源和物联网的出现，突然出现大量新技术，需要对城市进行重大重组。为了制定健全的公共政策，所有这些新技术都可以从城市模拟中受益匪浅，在政策制定之前衡量它们对城市和人民的影响。大规模城市模拟往往过于庞大和复杂，无法适应单台机器的资源和单个团队的专业知识。因此，分布式和去中心化的城市模拟是一项值得开发的技术。不幸的是，分布式模拟仍然很少使用（军事应用除外）。开发分布式仿真比开发非分布式仿真要困难得多，并且需要更高水平的软件工程专业知识，而建模和仿真专家通常不具备这些专业知识。研究人员和工程师都知道这些困难，多年来已经做出了一些努力来解决这些问题。最重要的工作之一是高级架构 (HLA) 标准的开发。然而，HLA 在实践中的采用却非常缓慢。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方面的技术差距。使用适当的软件工程概念和理论可以大大降低开发此类中间件的技术复杂性，并使 HLA 能够为包括科学家在内的更广泛的受众所使用。该提案的主要目的是研究是否使用面向方面的编程（ AOP）概念将有助于克服分布式仿真系统面临的工程挑战。 Kiczales、Lopes 等人于 1997 年提出。 AOP 提出了一种系统分解模型，其中包含基本功能分解以及一个或多个跨基本功能分解和相互交叉的正交分解。方面的概念（由 AOP 给出）与城市规划研究人员经常使用的城市方面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，但在本质上相同的模拟对象、城市及其坐标系上相互作用。将AOP范式应用到仿真领域存在很多未知的变量。例如，如果模拟器按方面划分，那么城市实体（例如个人、车辆和建筑物）很可能会为多个模拟器所共有。 HLA 标准强制要求任何模拟器都可以拥有对象的属性（即读写权限），但只能由一个模拟器拥有。因此，同一对象的多个方面需要共存，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不同版本的问题。确定如何维护各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仿真，那么这项工作将对大量建模和仿真专家的分布式仿真的可访问性产生巨大影响，因此无论建模和仿真在哪里，也会对政策制定产生潜在影响。用过的 ？在科学、物流、社会行为、运输管理、健康和土地等领域，仅举一些例子。