By Ron Kratzke, Principal Systems Engineer
Recently I have been fielding a number of questions regarding the use LINKs in behavior analysis when running COREsim.
As CORE users are well aware, the COREsim modeling capability which allows the system engineer to analyze the behavior of the system.
COREsim has an added feature that allows the system engineer to integrate the functions and physical architectures to provide unique insight into the overall system architecture.
Once the behavior model is completed for a particular level, the engineer does the analysis to allocate behavior to a physical architecture. Within the physical architecture components are “joined” together using INTERFACEs; and “connected” using LINKs.
LINKs are the physical representation of an interface. It is important to remember that a LINK has a couple of key attributes, namely Capacity and Delay. Capacity and Delay are physical characteristics that define LINK performance and the connection of the physical and functional architecture.
Recall that ITEMs are “transferred by” a LINK and that an ITEM also has a SIZE attribute. Additionally, more than one ITEM can be “transferred by” a LINK.
COREsim uses these LINK and ITEM class attributes for evaluating the feasibility of the proposed architecture once the association of the ITEMs to LINKs is completed. This allows the system engineer the ability to evaluate the architecture’s performance and possibly discover unexpected results.
COREsim evaluates three attributes (Delay, Size, and Capacity) within the ITEM and LINK classes respectively when is computes total time for a LINK to transfer an ITEM using the following equation:
Total LINK Time = [LINK Delay + (ITEM Size/LINK Capacity)]
The COREsim User Guide, section 4.10 provides a detailed discussion of executing LINKS and ITEMS.
As always, CORE users who are on our maintenance plan are encouraged to give us a call with any questions they have about using CORE. Just email support at support@vitechcorp.com or call 540-951-3999. You can also post to our forum at any time at community.vitechcorp.com.
