A Five Level Hierarchy for the Management of Simulation Models

Abstract

This advanced tutorial describes the goal-driven automated generation of models from a set of design specifications. A five level hierarchy is introduced which supports the automated generation of both models and simulation experiments from an abstract description of an overall design, and from an abstract description of the goals of the simulation study. The aim is to be able to generate models and experiments in a top-down fashion from a description of components and the couplings between these components by automating the stepwise refinement process. Detailed model descriptions are extracted from template files residing in model libraries. The paper emphasizes on the problems encountered in the automatic generation of continuous-system models since the synthesis of these models is more involved than the synthesis of discrete--event models.

The paper starts with an assessment of the need for the proposed automated model synthesis methodology. In the sequel, the advocated five level hierarchy will be presented in a bottom-up fashion starting with classical approaches to continuous-system simulation (the first and bottom layer of our hierarchy), and advancing to higher and higher levels of abstraction. The paper ends with the presentation of a complete example of the proposed methodology, now presented in a top-down fashion.


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Last modified: June 20, 2005 -- © François Cellier