On-demand Simulation of Future Mobility Based on Apache Kafka

The modeling and simulation community can benefit from building and running (co-)simulation models on-demand. In order to drive innovation further, it should be easy to set up, orchestrate, and execute simulations – even for researchers with no background in computer science. Additionally, open interfaces should be the default to enable a variety of applications. The possibility to connect external components smoothly with a simulation run allows for elaborate experiments. In this work, the details of the architecture and design of a simulation platform enabling evaluations of future mobility scenarios are presented. While the explanations are based on mobility applications, the concept can be generalized and applied to other domains. The novelty lies in the use of a big data stream processing platform called Apache Kafka. All kinds of required communication are handled by the Kafka middleware. Even the coupling of different simulators is realized on top of it. As a foundation, existing works regarding Modeling and Simulation as a Service are presented. The approach is then described by its architecture, its interfaces, and the life-cycle of a simulation run. Further information is given on the distribution of simulations and the topic-based clock synchronization mechanism. A performance evaluation shows that the approach is on one level with state-of-the art co-simulation middlewares.