The Study of Rare Event Systems' Behavior Using Simulation

Sudeep Shrestha ； Kuo-Di Jian

《International Journal of Automation and Control Engineering》 1卷1期 (2012/11) Pp. 1-8

並列摘要

Simulation is a useful tool in the design process when building a large-scale system. It helps to analyze several design factors like feasibility, cost, impact, outcome and risk in advance. Simulation is resource intensive when systems become large and complex. Especially, when we try to simulate a special type of systems called ＂rare event systems＂, the determination of the probability of such rare events with reasonable confidence interval can be a challenge in terms of computational resource, time, and budget. In this type of systems, the chance of the interested event's occurrence is slim. But the consequence of that is severe. Examples of this type of systems include: space exploration endeavors, air traffic control systems, nuclear reactors control systems, etc. Any rare accidental events in such systems could mean a missed opportunity to find a life in space, the loss of human lives, or the demise of entire life in the planet. The challenge of simulating this type of systems stems from the fact that we dare not miss important cases (have to cover those rare but important possibilities even though some of these are very low, thus a lot of computing time). In this paper, we will present a general-purpose rare event simulation framework package called ＂SPLITSIM＂ that is developed and promoted (distributed as open-source software) by us to address rare event simulation challenges; we will give descriptions about the architecture of our software design and give comments on essential parts of our implementation source code; we will also show features and advantages of our open-source package.

並列關鍵字

Algorithms ； System Design ； Optimization ； Simulation ； Rare Time Events ； Simulation Packages