An agent-based coupling platform for complex automata

The ability to couple distinct computational models of science and engineering systems is still a recurring challenge when developing multiphysics applications.
The applied coupling technique is often dictated by various constraints (such as hard- and software requirements for the submodels to be coupled). This may lead to different coupling strategies/implementations in case a submodel has to be replaced in an existing coupled setup.
Additional efforts are required when it comes to multiscale coupling. At least one of the submodels has to be modified to provide a matching interface on a specific spatial and temporal scale.
In the present paper we describe a generic coupling mechanism/framework to reduce these common problems and to facilitate the development of multiscale simulations consisting of a multitude of submodels.
The resulting implementation allows the coupling of legacy as well as dedicated codes with only minor adjustments. As the system is being build upon the JADE library, our platform fully supports computations on distributed heterogeneous hardware.
We discuss the platform’s capabilities by demonstrating the coupling of several cellular-automata kernels to model a coupled transport problem.