Simulation Experiment Schemas –Beyond Tools and Simulation Approaches

Simulation studies make use of various types of simulation experiments. For users, specifying these experiments is a demanding task since the specification depends on the experiment type and the idiosyncrasies of the used tools. Thus, we present an experiment generation procedure that guides users through the specification process, and abstracts away from the concrete execution environment. This abstraction is achieved by (1) developing schemas that define the properties of simulation experiments and dependencies between them, (2) specifying a mapping between schema properties and template fragments in the specification language of a target backend. We develop schema, template fragments, and mappings for stochastic discrete-event simulation, and show how the concepts can be transported to a different domain of modeling and simulation. Further, we expand the developed "simple" experiment schemas by a schema for experiment designs, and generate executable sensitivity analysis experiments, thereby demonstrating versatility and composability of our approach.