Visualising Interval-Based Simulations

Sammanfattning: Acumen is a language and tool for modeling and simulating cyber-physical systems. It allows the user to conduct simulations using a technique called rigorous simulation that produces results with explicit error bounds, expressed as intervals. This feature can be useful when designing and testing systems where the reliability of results or taking uncertainty into account is important. Unfortunately, analyzing these simulation results can be difficult, as Acumen supports only two ways of presenting them: raw data tables and 2D-plots. These views of the data make certain kinds of analysis cumbersome, such as understanding correlations between variables. This is especially true when the model in question is large. This project proposes a new way of visualising rigorous simulation results in Acumen. The goal of this project is to create a method for visualising intervallic values in 3D, and implement it in Acumen. To achieve that, every span of values is represented as a series of overlapping objects. This family of objects, which constitutes an under-approximation of the true simulation result, is then wrapped inside a semi-translucent box that is a conservative over-approximation of the simulation result. The resulting implementation makes for a combination of mathematical correctness (rigour), and mediation of intervals in question. It enables the user to explore the results of his rigorous simulations as conveniently as with the existing, non-rigorous simulation methods, using the 3D visualisation to simplify the study of real-life problems. To our knowledge, no existing software features visualisation of interval-based simulation results, nor is there any convention for doing this. Some ways in which the proposed solution could be improved are suggested at the end of this report