Testing discrete-event simulation programs using black-box techniques

  • Authors:

  • Evangelos Kehris

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Business Administration, Technological Educational Institute of Serres, Serres, Greece

  • Venue:
  • ICS'06 Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Simulation program development is supported by simulation languages and simulation-specific libraries developed in general-purpose programming languages. Although these software tools are widely discussed in the simulation literature, simulation programming testing, an important phase of a simulation study which aims to uncover errors in the simulation program, is to a large extend under-studied. This paper discusses two complementary testing techniques that have been found helpful in testing simulation programs developed using discrete-event simulation-specific libraries. The testing techniques are presented and adopted for use in simulation, modifications need to be introduced to the simulation library in order to apply the techniques are discussed and software tools that automate the testing process are presented. The power of the techniques to identify errors imputed in a simulation program is demonstrated.