Domain Project

We are excited to announce that our paper, “DESL: A Literate Programming Language Framework for Interoperable Parallel Discrete Event Simulation,” has been accepted at the ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM PADS ’25), to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This work presents DESL (pronounced diesel), a novel programming framework that unifies simulation model logic and documentation into a single literate source. Grounded in Model-Driven Engineering, DESL enables simulationists to write platform-independent models that can be automatically translated into executable code for multiple parallel discrete-event simulation (PDES) runtime environments (REs).

DESL addresses longstanding barriers in the simulation community: portability, reproducibility, and comparative performance analysis across different REs. Through formally defined Model-to-Model (M2M) and Model-to-Text (M2T) transformations, a DESL program can target REs such as ROSS, ROOT-Sim, and USE, without modifying the original source. The framework also supports the integration of domain-specific languages, allowing custom DSLs to be translated into DESL and immediately benefit from runtime interoperability.

In the paper, we provide both a formal foundation and an experimental evaluation. We show how DESL models for benchmarks like PHold and PCS can be executed across multiple REs, demonstrating comparable scalability and performance without any manual porting effort.

The acceptance of this work marks an important milestone for the DOMAIN project’s vision of building full-stack infrastructure for heterogeneous simulation. We look forward to presenting DESL to the community and discussing future directions for open, interoperable simulation frameworks.