DefiningGUIExperiment

Defining GUI Experiment

When you execute your simulation, you will often need to display some information. For each simulation, you can define some inputs and outputs:

• The inputs will be composed of parameters manipulated by the user for each simulation.
• The outputs will be composed of displays, monitors or output files. They will be define inside the scope output.

experiment exp_name type: gui {
   [input]
   output {
     [display statements]
     [monitor statements]
     [file statements]
   }
}

You can define two types of experiment (through the facet type):

• gui experiments (the default type) are used to play an experiment, and interpret its outputs.
• batch experiments are used to play an experiment several times (usually with other input values), used for model exploration. We will come back to this notion a bit further in the tutorial.

Inside experiment scope, you can access to some built-ins which can be useful, such as minimum_cycle_duration, to force the duration of one cycle.

experiment my_experiment type: gui {
	float minimum_cycle_duration <- 2.0#minute;
}

Other built-ins are available, to learn more about, go to the page experiment built-in.

In this part, we will focus on the gui experiments. We will start with learning how to define input parameters, then we will study the outputs, such as displays, monitors and inspectors, and export files. We will finish this part with how to define user commands.