Closure under Coupling of Cellular-DEVS for the Optimization of Memory Resource: Wildfire Spread Case Study

Abstract

The present work aims to show one of the advantages of using the property of closure under coupling in the DEVS specification. The advantage concerned in this paper attempts to address the need for memory resources during the simulation of systems by cellular-DEVS. This improvement of performance is based on the usage of the property closure under coupling in the DEVS formalism. With this property and taking account of the iterative behavior of each cellular-DEVS atomic model, we provide simulation of many models simultaneously. The method starts with the specification of the cellular-DEVS coupled model which is then converted into its equivalent DEVS atomic model. Thus, the goal of this conversion is to transform large quantities of atomic models coupled together, which require huge computational resources, into one DEVS atomic model. A case study is presented at the end of the work on modeling and simulation of forest fire propagation using DEVS and cellular-DEVS. A specification by cellular-DEVS of the forest fire model and its non-modular equivalent DEVS atomic model are presented. Finally, a comparison between both methods is presented in term of consumption of resources.