A Transactional Architecture for Simulation

We are developing a concurrent, agent-based approach to complex systems simulation as part of the CoSMoS project. In such simulations an agent's behaviour can typically be characterised as a series of queries and updates to its environment--a ''transactional'' pattern of interaction familiar to programmers of database systems. We explore how ideas from the field of databases, such as optimistic approaches to consistency and replication, may profitably be applied to the field of simulation, and how the constraints of modern databases can be relaxed to yield better performance while maintaining simulation validity.