SIM.JS – Discrete Event Simulation in JavaScript
SIM.JS is a general-purpose Discrete Event Simulation library written entirely in JavaScript.
NEW! Online Simulation based Learning with SIM.JS
SIM.JS is a library for modeling discrete time event systems:
- The library provides constructs to create Entities which are the active actors in the system and encapsulates the state and logic of components in a system.
- The entities contend for resources, which can be Facilities (services that are requested by entities; supports FIFO, LIFO with preemption and Processor Sharing service disciplines), Buffers (resources that can store finite amount of tokens) and Stores (resources that can store JavaScript objects).
- The entities communicate by waiting on Events or by sending Messages.
- Statistics recording and analysis is provided by Data Series Statistics (collection of discrete, time-independent observations), Time Series Statistics (collection of discrete, time-dependent observations) and Population Statistics (the behavior of population growth and decline).
- SIM.JS also provides a random number generation library to generate seeded random variates from various distributions, including uniform, exponential, normal, gamma, pareto and others.
SIM.JS is written in *idiomatic* JavaScript. The library is written in event-based design paradigm: the changes in system states are notified via callback functions (why not process-based?). The design takes advantage of the powerful feature sets of JavaScript: prototype based inheritance, first-class functions, closures, anonymous functions, runtime object modifications and so on. Of course, a knowledge of these principles is not required (a lot of this behind the scenes), but we do certainly hope that using SIM.JS will be pleasurable experience for the amateur as well as the experienced practitioners of JavaScript.
SIM.JS is free, open source and licensed under LGPL.
Why Javascript?
- The authors of this library are passionate about Discrete Event Simulations, and hope to see its widespread use in education as well as everyday applications. The authors also believe that in this era of Web 2.0, web-based applications are the best way to reach people. Which is why they concluded that there is a need for a Web enabled simulation engine.
- These days when one can boot linux with JavaScript, play Doom, run myriad of productivity applications on the Web, we ask – why not simulations? (And we say its about time!)