BoF-PSS2 Simulator
The simulator is designed for analysing liquidity needs and risks in payment and settlement systems. Special situations, often difficult or impossible to test in a real environment, can be readily simulated with BoF-PSS2. Thus, users can study how behavioral patterns and changes in policy and conventions impact the payment and settlement systems and participants. The efficiency of gridlock-resolution and liquidity-saving measures can be analyzed as well.
The object oriented modular implementation naturally supports Agent Based Modelling and all modern computer simulation techniques and extensions, as well as parallelization of computational tasks to achieve faster processing times in computationally large simulation analysis. The development strategy focuses at reducing user burden by automating tasks and developing reporting, and migrating the tool to up to date technologies and practices.
The current distribution version is 703. The version contains a long waited automated stress testing tool. The tool generates and runs chosen stress scenarios for a given benchmark simulation automatically. The stress tester computes new additional indicators: the maximum and minimum liquidity deterioration each participant is subject to in each scenario. Since version 600, the simulator supports DVP and PVP settlement processes for more than 2 linked transactions and newer versions of MariaDB and MySQL. Currently the main database version used by the team is MariaDB 10. The used Java version is 1.8.
The concept of business day has been introduced into the simulator in version 400. Business day is the key date variable for designating a simulation day or allocating data to belong to a certain business day. With the introduction of the Business day concept, the BoF-PSS2 simulator allows a business day to occur on multiple calendar days. This means that a business day can start before midnight or end after midnight. It is also possible to define the beginnings and ends of business days individually for each simulation day separately.
Since the version 3.2.1 BoF-PSS2 has no longer been distributed with an integrated MySQL connector and MySQL database. Database connections are handled via the JDBC interface. A BSD licensed Drizzle connector that can be used to connect to MySQL or MariaDB is provided. Users have to acquire a database software by themselves and they are allowed to change the connector to a more appropriate one if needed.
TARGET2 Simulator
A separate TARGET2 simulator version of BoF-PSS2 has been developed and delivered for the European System of Central Banks. It is based on the same basic software architechture and features of BoF-PSS2. Additional features are implemented as separate algorithm modules which replicate the proprietary algorithms of actual TARGET2 system. It is used by Eurosystem for quantitative analyses and numerical simulations of TARGET2.
TARGET2 simulator has been jointly delivered by Suomen Pankki (Bank of Finland) and the 3CB (Banca d'Italia, Deutsche Bundesbank, Banque de France) based on a decision of ECB Governing Council.
The architecture of the BoF-PSS2 product
