DESL: A Literate Programming Language Framework for Interoperable Parallel Discrete Event Simulation

Simulation is indispensable for advanced scientific research, enabling accurate explorations of complex phenomena and supporting evidence-based decision-making across interdisciplinary boundaries. Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) provides substantial advantages in modelling large-scale systems by distributing computational tasks among multiple processors, enhancing scalability. However, exploiting it is extremely challenging due to obstacles in model efficiency, concurrency control, reproducibility, and maintainability. Furthermore, the large number of available PDES run-time environments makes it difficult to explore their (performance) capabilities for some specific model, hindering the identification of the best-suited technology for a certain simulation study. To address these limitations, we introduce a unified framework grounded in literate programming and model-driven engineering, integrating interwoven documentation and model logic within a single source. This design enhances intrinsic consistency between model logic and explanatory content, while enabling the generation of model implementations tailored to multiple runtime environments, thus allowing simulationists to focus on model development without being locked in to any specific technology or environment. This facilitates model reuse and performance comparisons across diverse execution environments. We show the viability of this approach by providing the first-ever experimental comparison across three different simulators, starting from the same model implementation.