Computer Science 4 & MSc: Modelling and Simulation
This module runs in semester 1, on Tuesdays and Fridays at 12:10
(both in room Sem. 6, of the Chrystal McMillan Building (CMB), George Square), taught by
Kousha Etessami
and
Stephen Gilmore.
Tutorials are not given, but the lecturers will provide help by
prior arrangement.
The course is intended to provide you with a reasonable grounding in
how to make use of modelling techniques in order to evaluate the
dynamic behaviour of real systems. This includes choosing an
appropriate modelling formalism, constructing the model, verifying the
model and solving the model. The main emphasis of the lectures will
be on the different modelling formalisms and model construction.
However, through the many examples which will be presented in the
lectures and in the notes you will also gain experience of deciding
the right level of abstraction, verification and solution.
You are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the example models
available from these web pages and to experiment for yourselves.
- Documents
- Lecture Notes
- There is a lecture note to accompany
every lecture; these will be distributed as a booklet at the
beginning of the term. Alternatively, the individual notes (planned schedule) and
the booklet are available below.
- Errata for the notes. Please note the
following corrections to the notes as issued. Page numbers
refer to those in the complete notes booklet.
- Page 7, last but one line (before the bullet),
should read "we observe a Poisson process with parameter
\mu for some sufficiently small
time period of length h then:"
- Page 20, footnote 3. In the current DICE system,
use maple9 or xmaple9.
- Sections 6 and 7. All references to the path
/home/jeh/SPNP/... should be replaced by the
path /opt/spnp-1/....
- Software
- During the course, models constructed and solved using a
variety of techniques and software will be considered. Examples
will be made accessible via the web page. Details will be
given in lectures and lecture notes when we reach the
relevant part of the course.
- ./maple
This directory contains files which can be used as input to
maple, or xmaple, to generate performance measures for the
PC-LAN token ring with 4 or 6 nodes in the network. For your
convenience there is a single gzipped tar file which has all the
files within it. It is probably more informative to "cut and
paste" the maple commands into a window than just to read the
file in directly.
- spnp-examples
Details of running SPNP can be found in Lecture Note 6. Please note the
correction given above.
- pepa-examples Details of running the PEPA
Workbench can be found in Lecture
Note 8. The PEPA Workbench
assumes that all models are loaded from a subdirectory
models. Further information about the PEPA
Workbench is available on the web.
- Coursework
- There will be two pieces of assessed coursework.
- Practical 1, issued Friday 10th October (2008). Your
completed solution is due in on Thursday 6 November
by 16:00 to the ITO.
In order to complete the final question of the
practical you need to run two SPNP models:
- Practical 2 was issued on Friday, 31st October 2008. Your
completed solution is due in on Friday 28th November
at 11:00 am submitted electronically.
In order to complete Part C of the
practical you need the following PEPA model:
The following introduction to the PEPA Plug-in may be
helpful too.
- Exams
- In 1999/2000 the Modelling and Simulation course
switched from using the simulation language DEMOS to
using SimJava. You will find some questions relating to
SimJava in the April 1998 exam paper since both
languages were taught in the academic year 97/98.
