This paper discusses the construction of a new simulation and control tool that is designed to facilitate the modeling of distributed systems. This tool can be employed to design and implement distributed control architectures for managing large-scale, discrete event systems. Current commercial simulation tools cannot adequately model distributed control architectures. They can only model the system using a single model and therefore cannot adequately predict the performance constraints that these distributed architectures impose on the system. Furthermore, current tools are not designed to control the systems they model. Thus, in modeling and controlling such distributed systems, one must currently write the models using a general-purpose language such as C++. In simulation, the individual models are tied together using a model of the communications network included as part of the tool. This paper discusses this new tool, which is capable of addressing these concerns.
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