Supervision : Amal EL FALLAH SEGHROUCHNI

Co-supervision : HO Tuong Vinh, MARILLEAU Nicolas

Elaboration of a process and design of tools to introduce the collaboration in simulation

This thesis proposes an approach and conceptual tools to identify strategies for collaboration in the simulation of complex systems. Firstly, we show the indispensable of collaboration for the study of complex systems, especially for the simulation of this system. This collaboration takes place primarily among thematicians and around a simulator. However, it remains complex due to the remoteness of thematicians in a same research problem and also their seperation geograpic . In addition, the actual approaches modeling and simulation allows us to produce only simulators stand-alones. They are poor in terms of collaboration. It supports only local interactions, in a single interface. This is due to the fact that collaboration is inherent to complex systems modeled. Therefore, thematicians must use several different tools to support their collaborative work. However most of these tools can not completely respond to their need for collaborative simulation.
We then propose a new vision that facilitates collaboration in simulation of complex systems and an approach to design a specific collaborative tool. Our vision is mainly based on the simulator that is considered as a black box in which the thematicians focus only in its inputs and outputs. The collaboration limites to two cases: (i) exchanges, discussions to understand the inputs and outputs or (ii) the simultaneous manipulation of inputs and outputs. Moreover, by equipping collaborative functionalities for simulator stand-alone, we can obtain a specific collaborative tool, collaborative simulator, which is at once a simulator that allows the simulation and a collaborative tool that supports collaborative functionalities. The new approach, DeCoSim, allows to design, from an existing simulators stand-alones, a collaborative simulator which facilitates collaborative simulation of complex systems.
The proposed solutions have been implemented and evaluated in the context of geographical mobility with MIRO model. By applying our approach DeCoSim,, we transformed the simulator standalone MIRO in the one collaborative. Then, we combined with proposed mechanisms to facilitate the collaborative simulation among thematicians of MIRO . This case study was conducted with the help of real users of MIRO. This allows us to have an evaluation about the usability of our work.