THE DEVSJAVA SIMULATION VIEWER: A MODULAR GUI THAT VISUALIZES THE STRUCTURE AND BEHAVIOR OF HIERARCHICAL DEVS MODELS

This thesis describes the DEVSJAVA Simulation Viewer, a program written by the author to perform visualization of the structure and behavior of hierarchical DEVS models. The viewer meets a number of useful requirements with regards to its visualization and control capabilities, the most novel and important of which are its integrated, boxes-within-boxes-style view of the entire hierarchy of the model's components, and its animation of messages traversing across the couplings between components during each simulation step. The viewer's implementation employs software engineering techniques to extend the DEVSJAVA framework in such a way that there is little modification to the framework's core code, and also such that minimal changes need to be made to a model's source code for it to be displayable within the viewer. The performance of the viewer on models with a large number of components is also reported.