Automated Simulation as Part of a Design Workstation

A development project for a design workstation for advanced life-support systems (called the DAWN Project, for Design Assistant Workstation), incorporating qualitative simulation, required the implementation of a useful qualitative simulation capability and the integration of qualitative and quantitative simulations such that simulation capabilities are maximized without duplication. The reason is that to produce design solutions to a system goal, the behavior of the system in both a steady and perturbed state must be represented. We report here on the Qualitative Simulation Tool (QST), on an expert-system-like model building and simulation interface toll called Scratchpad (SP), and on the integration of QST and SP with more conventional, commercially available simulation packages now being applied in the evaluation of life-support system processes and components.