Structured DEVS Formalism: A Structural Modelling Method of Discrete Event Systems

In recent decades, it has been known that the Discrete Event System Specification, or DEVS, formalism provides sound semantics to design a modular and hierarchical model of a discrete event system. In spite of this benefit, practitioners have difficulties in applying the semantics to real-world systems modeling because DEVS needs to specify a large size of sets of events and/or states in an unstructured form. To resolve the difficulties, this paper proposes an extension of the DEVS formalism, called the Structured DEVS formalism, with an associated graphical representation, called the DEVS diagram, by means of structural representation of such sets based on closure property of set theory. The proposed formalism is proved to be equivalent to the original DEVS formalism in their model specification, yet the new formalism specifies sets in a structured form with a concept of phases, variables and ports. A simplified example of the structured DEVS with the DEVS diagram shows the effectiveness of the proposed formalism which can be easily implemented in an objected-oriented simulation environment.