A Simulation Scheduling Module to Improve User Experience in the Simugan Beef-Cattle Farm Simulator

Abstract

At the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences of the National University of Central Buenos Aires a client-server Beef-Cattle Farm simulator called Simugan has been developed. Simugan allows users to experiment over a virtual farm in a simple and low cost way compared with real farm conditions. Users can submit single simulation scenarios or multiple simulation scenarios packaged in an experimentation, where each scenario is a complete farm configuration. This is a key feature important in farm research, but with the drawback that some users might experiment long wait times for simulation results because of the amount of simulations the underlying hardware architecture has to process. Consequently, an heuristic scheduler module was added to Simugan producing a more equitative use of computer resources and an improvement of 41 % in users flow time, a popular metric to quantify how much time user simulations spend in the back end and hence a way of measuring deviations in users waiting times.