Software Engineering a Family of Complex Systems Simulation Model Apps on Android Tablets

摘要

Tablet computers are emerging as powerful platforms for educational and demonstration software in areas like computational science and simulation which previously had needed higher performance processing. Developing software as an App or even porting it from other interactive platforms still requires non-trivial software engineering effort however. We describe how a family of complex systems simulation models were developed as a domain related family of Apps and discuss the software engineering issues we encountered in generalising the data structures, and simulation code patterns to run as Android Apps. We also discuss performance achieved on various models with a range of modern tablet computers and other devices with similar processors. We speculate on how domain-specific software engineering methods could automate such future simulation model App development.