Software Tool Support

Modeling and evaluation of nontrivial technical systems are only possible in practice with the support of appropriate software tools. A graphical user interface should be provided to efficiently enter the graphical representations of discrete event system models. The task of improving a model until it behaves as expected can be supported by qualitative checks on the model as well as by an interactive simulation or visualization of the behavior. Finally, evaluation algorithms and other aspects such as code generation or direct control have to be implemented. Modular algorithms and code reuse might become more important in the future, especially with the Petri net markup language (PNML, [27]) exchange format. Abstract model descriptions like SDES of this text or the one used in the Möbius [81, 82] software tool have the potential for an integration of models and tools. Until then, however, most research groups and obviously commercial companies design and implement a complete tool individually, usually only for one specific model class.

This chapter briefly covers the software tool aspect in the context of the SDES modeling environment. An overview of selected existing software tools is given in Sect. 12.2. The subsequent Sect. 12.1 describes TimeNET, a software tool that is being designed and implemented in the group of the author. The techniques described in Part II of this text have been implemented in TimeNET, and it has been used for the application examples presented in Part III.