Incorporating the Actor Model into SCIVE on an Abstract Semantic Level
Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (SEARIS), proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2008 workshop, page 61-64. (2008)Abstract
This paper illustrates the temporal synchronization and process flow
facilities of a real-time simulation system which is based on the ac-
tor model. The requirements of such systems are compared against
the actor model\u0027s basic features and structures. The paper describes
how a modular architecture benefits from the actor model on the
module level and points out how the actor model enhances paral-
lelism and concurrency even down to the entity level. The actor
idea is incorporated into a novel simulation core for intelligent vir-
tual environments (SCIVE). SCIVE supports well-known and es-
tablished Virtual Reality paradigms like the scene graph metaphor,
field routing concepts etc. In addition, SCIVE provides an explicit
semantic representation of its internals as well as of the specific
virtual environments\u0027 contents. SCIVE uses a knowledge represen-
tation layer (KRL) to tie together the participating modules of a
simulation system and reflects this information between the mod-
ules and processes. As a consequence, the actor model based tem-
poral relations are lifted to the KRL which in turn is implemented
by a real-time tailored semantic net base formalism. The modules\u0027
process flow is henceforth described on the KRL. This high-level
description is extended down to the level of detailed function calls
between the modules. Functions, their parameters, and their return
values are reflected on the KRL. This provides an integrative se-
mantic description and interconnection layer uniformly accessible
a) for the incorporated technical modules and processes as well as
b) for the human designers and developers.
