Simulation Exploration Experience: A Distributed Hybrid Simulation of a Lunar Mining Operation

Abstract

Distributed simulation involves many complex techniques and technologies. There are very few educational resources to support the study of distributed simulation. The Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) (exploresimulation.com) is a partnership of government, industry, academia and professional associations that is attempting to support distributed simulation education in an exciting and challenging way. This annual programme of activities brings together teams of undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the world to build collaboratively a distributed simulation of a lunar expedition. This paper describes SEE and its lunar environment and discusses the experiences of Brunel University's 2014 student team who developed a hybrid distributed simulation of a lunar mining operation involving an agent-based simulation of a mine, a real-time simulation of an astronaut and a discrete-event simulation of a factory in SIMUL8.