Discrete Event Simulation

I am very new to Matlab and I am trying to create a discrete event simulation of a workflow process from a visio process map. The process has four process drivers (i guess theses would be "entities") and three different owners of the processes. Some of the process owners touch all four of the process drivers while others only touch certain types. At times, the owners processes occur simultaneously other times they occur one after the other, still other times it depends on a decision as to whether it goes to one owner or another. Could someone give me a real simple model of this, so that I can work from there? I'm wanting to start with something generic that works and learn by breaking it.

Answer 1

[Devdatt Lad]

I don't know of an already existing example out there, but I can point you to some examples that are available with SimEvents that might give you some inspiration.

1. Distributing Multi-Class Jobs to Service Stations: Shows how jobs (entities) can be associated with different processing recipes and then distributed accordingly to multiple service stations.

2. Using Entities as Resource Pools: Shows how you can create 2 entity pools of fixed sizes (perhaps corresponding to your four process drivers and three owners) and then associate these entities with each other for some kind of service.

These examples are in the product and they will lead you to other examples which might also provide some inspiration. One of the things you have to think about is associating components of your application to the semantics of a discrete event system, i.e. what does an entity correspond to in your application, what does a server correspond to etc? You can have multiple answers for this. E.g. in the example 2 above, entities correspond to jobs as well as resources, hence there are two families of entities.