A new Framework for the Analysis of Simultaneous Events
C. Barz, R. Gopffarth, Peter Martini, A. Wenzel · 2003
framework, analysis Discrete-event system simulation is a common technique for studying the behavior and performance of systems. It has been in usage now for several years, despite of certain issues concerning the vulnerability of this simulation technique. These issues were identified in the past, but have not yet been analyzed to a satisfactory extent. This paper deals with one of these issues, namely the challenge of simultaneous events. Previous work focused on determining a single execution order of simultaneous events, thus resulting in a single simulation result. For this purpose a formal framework has been developed. The present paper shows that this approach is not sufficient as simultaneous events may lead to different simulation results. Based upon the previous formal approaches, we introduce a new formalism allowing to examine the effects of simultaneously scheduled events more precisely by determining a set of simulation results. Mechanisms before and during the runtime of the simulation are introduced which prevent the calculation of unnecessary simulation results. At the same time they try to determine as many simulation results as possible. 1