Scenario

Maven artifactId: rinsim-scenario

The scenario module provides classes that allow to specify the problem side of a simulation as a Scenario. A Scenario is mainly a list of events that describe what will happen when and a set of models that define parts of the problem. To use a scenario in a simulation, you can wrap it in a ScenarioController as follows:

Simulator.builder()
  .addModel(
    ScenarioController.builder(scenario)
      // configure controller here
  )
  .build()

Scenario is a value object and a ScenarioController is an active component that dispatches the events and registers the models.

TimedEvent

The events in a scenario have to be of type TimedEvent. Each TimedEvent occurs on a specific time (specified as a long value). Since the scenario is meant to only encode problem specific parts of the simulation, details about algorithms should not be part of a scenario. However, an algorithm may want to react to an event (e.g. a change in the problem). For that reason, it is possible to add TimedEventHandlers to the ScenarioController like so:

ScenarioController.builder(scenario)
  .withEventHandler(MyEvent.class, new MyEventHandler())

In this example, the MyEventHandler instance will handle all events of type MyEvent that are defined in the scenario. The handler could for example inform the algorithm of the change in the problem, or it could create an agent to represent the information that is contained in the MyEvent.

Configuring a scenario

Scenario has a builder that can be used to configure scenarios as follows:

Scenario.builder()
  .setStopCondition(..) // allows to set a stop condition: when should the simulation terminate?
  .addEvent(..) // allows to add TimedEvent
  .addModel(..) // allows to add models
  .instanceId(..) // a string identifying this particular scenario instance
  .problemClass(..) // an instance of ProblemClass that identifies the type of problem, should be a value object.

ScenarioIO

Using ScenarioIO it is possible to read and write scenario instances to disk using the JSON format. For example:

Path file = // some path
ScenarioIO.write(scenarioIn, file);
Scenario scenarioOut = ScenarioIO.reader().apply(file);

scenarioIn.equals(scenarioOut); // returns true