RE: record & replay of probe activity

[Steven Clark]

Rick,

To incorporate your ideas neatly into Swarm you need Swarm itself to do
all the work.  The design you mentioned requires the object being set to
have a setMethod that records the setting of the IV into a file.  I
suggest that the probe itself record the activity into the file.

I agree that things would be cleaner from Swarm's point of view if we
insisted that all probe-settable IVs had setMyVar: methods, but that
would put a burden on the simulation programmer.  I like the idea of
using setMyVar: if it exists, otherwise directly modifying the data of
the object.

Back to recording and replaying probe activity, I suggest that you
really want two related, but independent capabilities:  record and
playback.  The record facility would capture all IV settings done via
probes during a run, into a file.  The playback facility would read a
file (of the same format) and schedule all the activities therein to
take place at the appropriate times.  I can imagine situations where one
might want to use either one without the other, or to manually (or
programmatically) edit the file.

(I bet that with a fully functional palyback facility we could have
written a script to generate a playback file that would get our "sc01"
simulation into a steady state.)

I am suspicious that there were some interesting details in the playback
that you didn't bother to mention in your posting.

Steven J. Clark       address@hidden       313-769-4396
Center for Electronic Commerce, Industrial Technology Institute
Box 1485, Ann Arbor, MI  48106


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