2012 COMP 522 Modelling and Simulation Projects

  The purpose of a project

The course has given a birds-eye view of different formalisms: Causal Block Diagrams (algebraic/discrete-time/continuous-time), Petri Nets, Event Scheduling, Statecharts, DEVS, kiltera, Forrester System Dynamics, ... These formalisms each have their strengths and weaknesses: some (such as Petri Nets) are more suited for analysis across all possible behaviours of a system, others are ideally suited for performance analysis (such as DEVS) whereas others allow for simulation and system synthesis (such as Statecharts). During the course, the similarities and differences between these formalisms have been shown.

To study truly complex systems, it is necessary to go beyond this limited set of formalisms. On the one hand, this means looking at other formalisms. On the other hand, this means combining formalisms. A continuous (e.g., CBD) and discrete-event (e.g., DEVS) formalism can for example be combined to form a "hybrid" formalism. Another example is the combination of some notion of spatial distribution with a known formalism such as state automata. One such combination leads to Cellular Automata.

The purpose of the projects is to let you explore these new formalisms. During the project presentations, you will be exposed to a number of new formalisms, presented by your colleagues, which were not covered during the lectures.

There are two types of projects:

  The structure of a project

  Examples

  2012 Projects

Your project report should be written in LaTeX. If you're new to LaTeX, many tutorials such as this LaTeX primer are available.
You must use Elsevier's elsarticle style. You should download the elsarticle.zip archive. elsdoc.pdf contains the user documentation and elsarticle-template-harv.tex is the document template you should use as a starting point for your report.
Your report should contain at least the following:
  • A title capturing the essence of your work.
  • Author name, affiliation, and contact information.
  • An abstract presenting the paper's contribution. Based on the abstract, readers will decide whether or not your paper is worth reading.
  • Keywords summarising the paper.
  • A introduction presenting the problem/context. The introduction section should end with an overview of the rest of the paper. For example: ``Section 2 gives an overview of related work. Section 3 presents the design of our new architecture. ... Section 7 concludes.
  • A related work section, with references. If it is not elaborate enough to warrant its own section, related work may go into the introduction section.
  • A number of sections presenting the details of your contribution. This could contain details of your design.
  • If applicable, a section presenting the experience with using your work, including a performance evaluation.
  • a comparison of your work with that of others (what is new/better/...).
  • Conclusions and future work.
  • A bibliography. You must use bibTeX!
Note that your report should be a cross between a journal publication (where only the essence of the novel contribution should be presented) and a technical report (where technical details may be explained and there is no limitation on the number of pages used).

Presentations will be on Thursday 26 April, in MC103. Times are given in the table below.
Some criteria for a good presentation

Omar Alam Agent-Based (Statecharts) vs. Forrester System Dynamics 13:30 project page
Abir Ayed Statecharts for Interactive Fiction Games, adding time 10:45 project page
Emil Dafinov Testing Statecharts 13:00 project page
Rifeng Ding hybrid and multi-formalism modelling in Ptolemy II project page
Julien Gascon-Samson Statecharts for Interactive Fiction Games, link with (P)NFG 10:45 project page
Maris Jukss simulation of Place/Transition Petri Nets in AToMPM 11:45 project page
Ben Kybartas Using Graph Rewriting for Narrative Generation 10:20 project page
Bentley James Oakes Embedding Causal Block Diagrams into Behaviour Trees 10:00 project page
Andrey Paunov (Chaos in) Cellular Automata 09:10 project page
Roger Ruiz-Carrillo Reachability/Coverability analysis for Petri net models given in PNML format 11:25 project page
Mohamed Smaoui ODE modelling of the effect of food and amyloids on triggering Type II diabetes project page
Jonathan Tremblay Understanding Behaviour Trees 09:30 project page
Alexandre Vassalotti Modelling Infectuous Diseases 13:55 project page
Hiu Kim Yuen DEVS modelling of information propagation project page

  Original Work

You are encouraged to help each other formulate the ideas behind projects and find inspiration in the literature and on the web, but each team is required to submit their own original work. Handing in work that is not your own, original work as if it is your own is plagiarism. All re-use, collaboration, inspiration must be explicitly mentioned in the assignment.
McGill University values academic integrity. Therefore all students must understand the meaning and consequences of cheating, plagiarism and other academic offences under the code of student conduct and disciplinary procedures (see www.mcgill.ca/integrity for more information).

Maintained by Hans Vangheluwe. Last Modified: 2012/04/26 19:54:04.