Benefits of graphical animation of advanced AltaRica 3.0 models
Résumé
Most system engineers today use graphical representations to represent their system models. This is important tobetter understand and to communicate not only on the system, but also on the model itself.AltaRica 3.0 is a high level formal modeling language dedicated to probabilistic risk and safety analyses of complextechnical systems. Models written in AltaRica 3.0 are textual. So according to the following adage “a good image isworth a thousand words”, graphical representations of these models are necessary for good communication; but thereference remains the text. Moreover, beyond simple graphical representations, graphical simulation of models canbe used to perform virtual experiments on systems, helping to better understand the system behavior.In this paper, we show how to model graphical representations using the high level modeling language GraphXica.GraphXica has the same structural constructs as AltaRica 3.0. It enables to describe graphical primitives (lines,rectangles, circles, etc.) and their animations (color change, scale, rotation, translation, etc.). Moreover, we illustratehow the graphical models of GraphXica can be coupled with AltaRica 3.0 models, and how their animationscommunicate with the stepwise simulator of AltaRica 3.0.Finally, we demonstrate, by means of an example, the benefits of graphical animation of the textual AltaRica 3.0models in order to perform virtual experiments by visualizing the incident or accident scenarios.