Universal simulation engine (USE): a model-independent library for discrete event simulation

Universal Simulation Engine (USE) is a C++ library providing a model-independent environment for Discrete Event Simulation (DES) tasks. Unlike most simulators, USE focuses on the general simulation technology and integrates many features, which are necessary to build a correct and efficient simulation system. It is aimed at providing a professional environment to reduce the cost of modeling as well as the execution time of the simulation for almost all DES models. Developers may use USE as an open framework to build models very efficiently. USE also supports many advanced features such as Distributed Discrete Event Simulation (DDES), Virtual Environments (VE), Online Simulation (OS), dynamic coupling / decoupling of sub-models, etc. This paper introduces the distinctive features of USE for practical implementation of DES, DDES and VE systems. We also evaluate the performance of USE by comparison with existing simulators.