A comparison of certain simulation systems

Abstract

In recent years' the use of simulation in the world has expanded rapidly. The writing of a simulation program in one of the general purpose programming languages such as FORTRAN, ALGOL etc., was very difficult. This necessitated the development of a number of so-called "General Purpose Simulation Languages" that are aimed at simplifying the task of writing simulation programs for a variety of different types of models. Among these simulation languages that have been developed are the GFSS and SIMSCRIPT languages. At the present time there are many simulation languages available, but the most are special-purpose types which are not widely used. The major simulation languages in the world today include GPSS and SIMSCRIPT. Of these GPSS is the most widely used. This book provides briefly a description of GPSS, SIMSCRIPT and FORTRAN languages used in the computer simulation systems, as well as the requirements for programming simulation on a computer. Our. major purpose is to solve a number of such problems in GPSS and FORTRAN in order to facilitate a comparison between these two languages. In addition we shall display a very powerful package of FORTRAN subroutines in order to simplify the work of doing simulation in FORTRAN.

This book is divided into five chapters. Chapter one provides a general introduction to the General Purpose Simulation System (GPSS). It is to be noted that GPSS exists in several versions. Here we shall describe the GPSS/3oO language as it is implemented on the IBM 360 computers. Chapter two describes four different simulation models in GPSS to demonstrate the use of this language. Chapter three contains a survey of the SIMSCRIPT simulation language and a comparison between GPSS and SIMSCRIPT. Chapter four describes in FORTRAN the same models. as in chapter two in order to illustrate the applicability of FORTRAN in simulation models. Finally, the last five chapter, compares the capabilities between GPSS and FORTRAN languages and discusses the output results of all the four models in both languages.