Design-time simulation of domain-specific models by incremental pattern matching

In this paper, we present a general purpose discrete event simulation framework for domain-specific visual languages describing system behavior. In our framework, the dynamic semantics of the language is captured by a combination of graph transformation and abstract state machine rules as provided by the model transformation language of VIATRA2, which allows to capture complex model changes at each simulation step. For an efficient execution of the simulation, incremental graph pattern matching is used to avoid the re-computation of enabledness conditions of simulation rules by incrementally keeping track of rule contexts.