Tour of SystemBlend™, Part 3: IntegrationMaster

This is the third of a three-part series describing SystemBlend™ and how it works. For this article, I’ll describe IntegrationMaster.

In my earlier article on SystemDesigner, I described how the simulation team graphically develops the design database using SystemDesigner. In my subsequent article on ComponentGuide, I described how the subsystem modelers use ComponentGuide to build subsystem models. In this article I describe how system analysts use IntegrationMaster to rapidly integrate the components into a working simulation.

Imagine you’re part of a team that is building a simulation using subsystem models from other organizations, and your task is to analyze the system performance using the simulation.

You start by launching Integration Master:

Next, load the components into the palette. In the Client/Server variant of SystemBlend™, simply select which components to download from the server:

In the File-Based variant of SystemBlend, simply drag the packaged components into the palette:

Next, create an empty simulation:

Because you can create multiple simulations to support different analysis needs, the simulations are called “Scenarios”.

The new scenario is an empty canvas:

To load the components into the scenario, simply drag them from the palette:

To connect components, simply draw the connections:

IntegrationMaster has full knowledge of the design created in SystemDesigner, so it knows what components can be connected, and how to connect them. It provides visual cues to guide you and to let you know what connections are needed:

The simulation is complete:

Now that the simulation is ready, IntegrationMaster can generate a stand-alone simulation that is ready to run.

Alternatively, IntegrationMaster can run the simulation directly:

The analyses that IntegrationMaster can perform include Monte Carlo, parameter sweep, design space exploration, and nominal run.

To aid the analysis of the system, IntegrationMaster provides full access to all component-level and system-level parameters for tuning and optimization:

As illustrated in this article, integrating components from different organizations into a fully functioning simulation takes minutes.

I’ve worked on many distributed simulation projects, and on all of these projects the initial integration took at least a month. As these projects matured, integrating new or updated components typically took days or weeks. The SystemBlend solution condenses all of that to just minutes.