Week's Objectives:

1. Discuss simulation in general.
2. Discuss time-driven simulation, with a simple example.
3. Discuss real-time simulation, with the space shuttle as an example.
4. Develop intuition about interarrival times of randomly occurring events.
5. Study event-driven simulation.

1. Simulation in general. A general discussion appears in the writeup below. Simulation is now an essential tool for modern simulation. There are several types of simulation:
   • Time-driven (discussed below).
   • Real-time (an important special case of time-driven, where the passage of time in the simulation should correspond exactly with the passage of time on a clock).
   • Event-driven (see below -- this the focus of most of the discussion).

2. Time-driven simulation. In class, we worked through a very simple simulation of a line of cars waiting at a traffic light. See Traffic light simulation.

3. Real-time simulation. Discussed in class.

4. Interarrival times of randomly occurring events. See Discussion and Java applets.

5. Event-driven simulation. The course material on event-driven simulation is presented as part of Recitation 6. Here are links to the important materials:
   • The Recitation itself: Recitation 6.

   • A case study explaining the recitation: Simulation Case Study.

   • A special webpage by the developers of this recitation: Webpage.

   • A paper on this material written by the developers of this recitation: SIGCSE paper.