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Visualizing and Implementing with Simulations

Enterprise Architect is not only a platform for creating and managing StateMachine diagrams, it also provides sophisticated Simulation facilities for engineers and other stakeholders to visualize the StateMachines.  This brings the models to life and provides a visualization tool, not only for the Engineer who is developing the models, but also for the other audiences, both technical and non-technical, who need to understand what the model is saying. It is somewhat like an author reading a newly written passage of text out aloud, and it can help the engineer find errors in the models or aspects of the models that should be corrected or reworked. It is particularly useful as the models become more complex, with nested sub-states, complex Triggers and Guards, and pseudostates such as Forks and Joins that split and reunite transitions.

With extensive support for Triggers, Trigger Sets, nested States, concurrent States, dynamic effects and other advanced simulation capabilities, the feature provides a sophisticated environment in which to build interactive and working models that help explore, test and visually trace complex business, software and system behavior. There is a ribbon dedicated to simulation, which provides a range of items that can be used for both dynamic and executable simulations of StateMachines. This image shows the core tools for working with dynamic simulations.

The second image shows the other advanced tools, including the Executable StateMachine, that can be used to create executions of the StateMachine to produce fully implementable and compilable programming code directly from the simulated StateMachines. The image also shows a number of other facilities, including Modelica and Simulink, which are sophisticated tools for running complex parametric simulations.

This diagram shows a simple dynamic simulation of the traffic light system that we looked at in the previous exercise. It shows the dynamic simulation in action.