Applying Active Database Models for Simulation

Complex physical systems require the support of data models to define and manipulate the data generated during simulation. These models should have the expressive power to represent the static and temporal relationships among data and they should have the capability to initiate actions to enforce these relationships when the application state is changed. Most commercial databases are passive, i.e., they do not take action or enforce a constraint when the data undergoes a state change. Object oriented database systems have taken the technology one step further by encapsulating operations with the data. In this paper we propose a data model for simulation which builds on object oriented and active database principles to represent physical systems in terms of its structure and function. This model is called the structure-function paradigm, or SF-paradigm for short.