Accelerated Simulation of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems via a Multi-Fidelity Modeling Framework

Abstract

Simulation analysis has been performed for simulation experiments of all possible input combinations as a “what-if” analysis, which causes the simulation to be extremely time-consuming. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a multi-fidelity modeling framework for enhancing simulation speed while minimizing simulation accuracy loss. A target system for this framework is a discrete event dynamic system. The dynamic property of the system facilitates the development of variable fidelity models for the target system due to its high computational cost; and the discrete event property allows for determining when to change the fidelity within a simulation scenario. For formal representation, the paper defines several key concepts such as an interest region, a fidelity change condition, and a selection model. These concepts are integrated into the framework to allow for the achievement of a condition-based disjunction of high- and low-fidelity simulations within a scenario. The proposed framework is applied to two case studies: unmanned underwater and urban transportation vehicles. The results show that simulation speed increases at least 1.21 times with a 5% accuracy loss. We expect that the proposed framework will resolve a computationally expensive problem in the simulation analysis of discrete event dynamic systems.

Keywords

• system modeling
• simulation analysis
• simulation speedup
• discrete event dynamic system
• differential equation
• discrete event system specification (DEVS)