PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper illustrates the temporal synchronization and process flow facilities of a real-time simulation system which is based on the ac- tor model. The requirements of such systems are compared against the actor model's basic features and structures. The paper describes how a modular architecture benefits from the actor model on the module level and points out how the actor model enhances paral- lelism and concurrency even down to the entity level. The actor idea is incorporated into a novel simulation core for intelligent vir- tual environments (SCIVE). SCIVE supports well-known and es- tablished Virtual Reality paradigms like the scene graph metaphor, field routing concepts etc. In addition, SCIVE provides an explicit semantic representation of its internals as well as of the specific virtual environments' contents. SCIVE uses a knowledge represen- tation layer (KRL) to tie together the participating modules of a simulation system and reflects this information between the mod- ules and processes. As a consequence, the actor model based tem- poral relations are lifted to the KRL which in turn is implemented by a real-time tailored semantic net base formalism. The modules' process flow is henceforth described on the KRL. This high-level description is extended down to the level of detailed function calls between the modules. Functions, their parameters, and their return values are reflected on the KRL. This provides an integrative se- mantic description and interconnection layer uniformly accessible a) for the incorporated technical modules and processes as well as b) for the human designers and developers.