An efficient approach to collaborative simulation of variable structure systems on multi-core machines

Complex variable-structure systems (CVSSs) are a common type of complex systems that exhibit changes both at structural and behavior levels. Simulations of CVSSs challenge current collaborative execution methods with increasingly big and complex models. The emergence of multi-core paradigm presents an exciting opportunity to address such challenge, so an advanced parallel simulator under multi-core environments is proposed. The simulator: (1) provides thread simulation kernels and five kinds of management services to support dynamic model structure flexibly; (2) can explore both inherent and dynamic parallelism among models based on interaction relations, and employ the multi-thread paradigm to gain good speedup; (3) adopts an efficient dynamic load-balancing method, which can migrate models among cores with very low cost and support dynamic core allocation on demand, to address evident load-imbalance problems brought by variable-structure. The experiments show that structure changes can be supported while up to 23 % performance increase can be gained.