Modular Design and Simulation of Complex TPN Models

This paper introduces TPN Designer, a graphical integrated development environment implemented in Java, which allows modelling, discrete-event simulation and analysis of complex systems. TPN Designer is characterized by its extensive support to the modular construction of scalable models. A large model can be decomposed into pages provided of an interface of input/output ports. Pages can be incrementally refined with a subnet which in turn can hierarchically be organized into sub-pages/subnets to any depth. Port connections can be specified by a scripting language. A script can also be attached to a whole model for the initial parameter set-up. The paper shows the use of TPN Designer through a unified model for studying distributed memory multithreaded multiprocessor systems.