A Logic For Simulating Discontinuous Systems

This paper presents DMOD, a formalism for simplifying the synthesis and analysis of programs for simulating discontinuous systems. It lacks the concept of explicit state. Its programs are constraints upon event occurrences, based upon a novel view of the causality relation. Constraints can freely refer to the past and future of causing events. Simulation is regarded as inference of event occurrences from constraints. An event is said to occur when an interesting proposition becomes true. The new concept of partially instantiated events is introduced.DMOD can be regarded as a formalization of the widely used event scheduling view of the discrete-event simulation technique. However, it shows how event occurrences can be computed without devices of scheduling, unscheduling or event queues, which are intrinsic to this view. Due to partially instantiated events, DMOD can also be considered more general.