Rapid Generation of System Models for Simulation Based Design

When engineers are designing a very complex system, it would be greatly advantageous for them to be able to construct simulation models of every reasonable configuration for that system. This would allow them to fully explore the system's design space and choose the optimal configuration for implementation. However, this is not possible within a reasonable period of time using current simulation technology, which relies heavily on large amounts of low-level user input to construct simulation models. Consequently, it requires an enormous amount of time and effort to create large numbers of complex simulation models. A faster way of creating simulation models is needed, one that does not require such large amounts of user input. To solve an instance of this problem, we developed a simulation model generation application (SMGA) software tool at the University of South Carolina for generating simulation models for the electrical systems of ships using the Virtual Test Bed (VTB) simulation software suite. VTB was selected because it exposes its internal simulation model construction methods as a .NET library, and as a result can be easily leveraged to create a SMGA. The SMGA we created rapidly generates simulation models by allowing a user to specify small numbers of high-level parameters, which are then used by the SMGA to create, configure, and connect the appropriate templates. By automatically keeping track of certain statistics, our SMGA aids an engineer in adding a greater level of detail to a simulation model than they would otherwise be