Doing object oriented simulations: advantages, new development tools

Abstract

In response to academic needs concerning modern digital control, the authors made a variety of educational aids based on simulation. They decided to employ OOP and selected some representative industrial subsystems to be simulated. OOP helped to analyze and implement the functions of the operational simulations, using an academic analogy for tasks distribution: lessons and teachers are 'objects' coordinated to carry out the educational process, with the subsystems models as a resource. This distribution helps to structure the artificial intelligence, incorporated in the objects as specialized experts. The authors used Smalltalk for a rapid prototyping, and then C++ for the final versions. As the learning curve is slow for OOP, they began with a small team and small projects, building re-usable pieces of code, some of them for 3D animated graphics. They employed ObjectVision as a CASE tool to construct objects and generate C++ commented code. They used CommonView C++ classes, so the man-machine interface of their simulations is MS-Windows.<>