General Purpose Visual Simulation System: A Functional Description

Bishop, John L. and Balci, Osman (1989) General Purpose Visual Simulation System: A Functional Description. Technical Report TR-89-33, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Abstract

The purpose of the research described herein is to develop a software system that aids a simulationist in constructing and executing a general purpose discrete event visual simulation model. A literature review has shown the need for an integrated visual simulation system that provides for the graphical definition and interactive specification of the model while maintaining application independence. The General Purpose Visual Simulation System (GPVSS) developed in this research meets this need by assisting a simulationist to: (1) graphically design a simulation model and its visualization, (2) interactively specify the model's logic, and (3) automatically generate the executable version of the model in C programming language, while maintaining domain independence. GPVSS is developed on a Sun 3/160C computer workstation using SunView graphical interface. It consists of over 11,000 lines of documented code. GPVSS has been successfully treated in many case studies.