DESMO-J Distilled

Introduction

This section of the tutorial provides you with a brief guide to model building with DESMO-J. You may use it as a quick reference or as a guideline whenever you lose sight of your target.

Model building in general can be divided into several phases:

1. Model design: identify the system to model, decide on system boundaries (what to include/exclude), and use abstraction and aggregation to arrive at a conceptual model which simplifies the real system just enough to be useful
2. Model implementation: map the conceptual model to an executable model, i.e. a computer program
3. Model validation: try to show that the model's behaviour corresponds to the real system in relevant aspects, e.g. through empirical observation (observed measures are close enough to data produced by the model)
4. Model experimentation and analysis: run experiments on the model and interpret the obtained results based on some theory about the real system

In this brief guide we will focus on the second phase, model implementation, with some considerations to model design and experimentation. We will not, however, cover the aspects of validation or analysis.