Simulation Driven Development of the German Toll System – Simulation Performance at the Kernel and Application Level

Simulation driven development - the idea of using simulation models as executable system specification in any phase of the system development process [4] - depends on the performance of the simulation model and execution framework. We study the performance issues of an existing large-scale simulation model of the German toll system using a discrete-event simulation (DES) model. The article first introduces the German toll system and the simulation framework developed to analyze the systems’ behavior. To address the simulation performance the article describes a number of common performance limitations of several commercial and non-commercialDES simulation kernels. These performance limitations are addressed in kernel-level benchmarks. At the application-level a DES implementation of the German toll system is used to compare two commercial DES tools and several optimizations are introduced both on the simulation model and kernel level to achieve the necessary performance for a detailed and realistic simulation of a fleet of 750 000 trucks.