Agent-oriented modeling and agent-based simulation

Agent-oriented modeling of software and information systems and agent-based simulation are commonly viewed as two separate fields with different concepts and techniques. We argue that a sufficiently expressive agent-oriented modeling language for information systems analysis and design should - with some minor extensions - also be usable for specifying simulation models that can be executed by an agent-based simulation system. Specifically, we investigate the suitability of the Agent-Object-Relationship modeling language (AORML) proposed in [Wag03] for simulation. We show that the AOR meta-model and the meta-model of discrete event simulation can be combined into a model of agent-based discrete event simulation in a natural way.