Computer System Simulation: A Design Evaluation Tool.

摘要

Computers embedded within weapon systems add to their complexity and to the difficulty encountered in developing such weapon systems within cost and schedule constraints with required performance. A primary contributor to the difficulty in achieving success with an embedded computer system development is the heretofor lack of a procedural approach to computer system design evaluation and lack of tools suitable to provide understandable and responsive analyses. Two propositions are presented. First, that computer system design evaluation activities should follow a six step process consisting of: requirements analysis, design alternative synthesis, model building, experimentation, evaluation of results and documentation. Conduct of this procedure should be done by an integrated design evaluation team of users, designers, and developers. Early use of the procedure introduces discipline to the process which might otherwise be driven by emotional bias. The team approach minimizes communication gap problems and shortens the overall design process. The second proposition states that computer system simulation is a valuable tool which can be effectively used during the validation phase to articulate designs in the form of readable models and to gather valuable estimates of performance for each proposed design.