Capturing and reporting provenance information of simulation studies based on an artifact-based workflow approach

Abstract

Provenance comprises information about how a product has been generated in a process. Thus, provenance information about an entire simulation study would support the interpretation and reuse of the developed simulation model and simulation experiments. However, current approaches only support to capture parts of the provenance information of a simulation study, i.e., the provenance information of the simulation data generated by individual simulation experiments. In this work, we extend a declarative, artifact-based workflow to capture provenance information about an entire simulation by observing the user in the study process. The workflow relates the building processes of central products of a simulation study, such as the conceptual model, requirements, input data, simulation model, and simulation experiments. Additionally, the workflow guides the modeler through the simulation study process while ensuring the consistency between its products. Further, we also develop different strategies to report the captured provenance information. These enable the user to respectively understand the simulation study at different levels of abstractions.