TAKING THE RIGHT STEP: DETERMINE THE CORRECT ENTITY EXECUTION ORDERING IN A TIME-STEPPED SIMULATION

摘要

Time-stepped execution is a widely used simulation execution strategy. It has many advantages over event driven execution when direct control of the simulation pace is required. Hence, time-stepped execution is the preferred choice for hardware-in-the-loop (real time) simulations. This paper describes the control flow and components of a time-stepped simulation. A large portion of this paper is devoted to solve the entity execution ordering, which is a key problem in time stepped simulations. We convert the problem of entity execution ordering into a data dependency problem. Two novel algorithms, the explicit approach and the speculative approach, are presented. Main contributions of this paper include: an overview of the time-stepped simulation control flow, the recognition of the problem of data dependency in entity execution ordering, and two solutions for this problem.