On event ordering in parallel discrete event simulation

Abstract

Ordering of simultaneous events in DES is an important issue as it has an impact on modelling expressiveness, model correctness as well as causal dependencies. In sequential DES this is a problem which has attracted much attention over the years and most systems provide the user with tools to deal with such issues. This has also attracted some attention within the PDES community and we present an overview of these efforts. We have, however, not yet found a scheme which provides us with the desired functionality. Thus, we present and evaluate some simple schemes to achieve a well defined ordering of events and means to identify both causally dependent and independent events with identical timestamps in the context of optimistic simulations. These schemes should be applicable also to conservative PDES.