The OSA project: an example of component based software engineering techniques applied to simulation

In this paper I manage to give a global and comprehensive overview on the Open Simulation Architecture project (OSA). OSA is an open software platform that aims at supporting empirical studies based on discrete-event simulations. The underlying philosophy of OSA is to exploit and apply everywhere it is possible the latest relevant Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) techniques, in order to ease reuse of existing or new simulation software and models. In this paper we show how these techniques may be applied at several levels (Architecture, Simulation Engine, Modeling API and Simulation Engine) and with which expected benefits.