A five level hierarchy for the management of simulation models

The goal-driven automated generation of models from a set of design specifications is described. 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 static 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 authors emphasize 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. It is shown how a particular implementation of an automatic model synthesis tool, the DEVS-Scheme modeling environment, can be used to tackle a number of important realistic application problems