Your fastest path from concept to deployment!
Hindsight is 20/20 ... Foresight is better!
Visualize a system that works!
Engineers building tools for engineers!
Insanity is doing things the same old way and expecting different results!
Your fastest path from concept to deployment!
Hindsight is 20/20 ... Foresight is better!
Visualize a system that works!
Engineers building tools for engineers!
Insanity is doing things the same old way and expecting different results!
"Lockheed Martin, the world leader in the design of aerospace and defense technologies, selected Foresight as its corporate standard system engineering architecture analysis tool for discrete event simulation. To earn the banner of 'Lockheed Martin Preferred Tool', Foresight won the rigorous 'Ten Step' procurement process for this tool category as conducted by the Systems Engineering Subcouncil of the Lockheed Martin engineering process improvement program."
Program Manager, Systems Engineering Tools; Lockheed Martin Engineering Process Improvement Center.
"I recently have been able to compare our Foresight model results with actual CNI hardware in the lab. The results from the lab are correlating nicely so far. The lab data correlates much better than I would have hoped, actually. I generally worry about microsecond to microsecond performance comparisons (since the model cannot be as complex as the actual system). Also, it's [very difficult to get] everything configured correctly to do a fair "apples to apples" test. Generally [the test team doesn't] have too much flexibility to set up sophisticated tests. However, we did a fairly high resolution model of our hardware (and software) components, so it tracks rather well when looking at critical latencies."
Foresight user at Northrop Grumman, designing an SDR Project.
Resource Aware Modeling and Simulation (RAMS) (PDF) creates a virtual prototype that allows you to visualize, and interact with, your system in action. This powerful methodology enables you to analyze performance, verify behavior and perform trade studies on architecture very early in your design cycle. While these pages will provide a good overview of RAMS, we've prepared a whitepaper that fully explores RAMS and provides additional examples.
Every system has two components: What it does, and what it's built on. These are common to every kind of system, from naturally occurring biological systems to business processes to complex embedded systems. These two facets work together to complete the system's mission. While they are connected, and place requirements on one another, they are distinct and separable. The systems engineering discipline works to develop both facets of the system in order to fulfill the requirements of the system. The challenge of optimizing a system is employing minimal resources to fully meet the system requirements.
We can define these two facets of a system as follows:
Behavior: The behavior of the system is what it does in order to accomplish its objectives and fulfill its functional requirements. "Functionality" is another word for behavior in this context. The behavior of the system often consists of a collection of interconnected functional components, each of which performs some aspect of the job.
Platform: The platform is the collection of resources that the behavior is implemented on. A resource is something that supplies a good, or service, required by the behavior. The platform consists of a variety of potentially interdependent resource components.
Both the behavior and the platform can be decomposed hierarchically to manage complexity.
The behavior and platform are truly separable. Different platforms can underlie a given behavior, while the same platform can serve multiple behaviors. For example, either a police officer resource, or a traffic signal resource can implement a manage traffic flow behavior. Likewise, a police officer resource can serve either the manage traffic flow function or the enforce speed limit function. In some circumstances, the police officer resource might make use of a patrol car resource in order to accomplish the manage traffic flow function.
The behavior clearly places requirements on the platform for operations that must be performed. In turn, the platform places resource constraints on the behavior that ultimately determine the performance of the system.
Of course, costs are always associated with resources. The specific nature of the cost depends on the resource. Some examples of costs include capital expenditures for equipment, maintenance expenses, wages, time, power consumption, weight, bandwidth and so on. Understanding the performance drivers for the system and how they interrelate is absolutely necessary to meet our overriding objective of building an optimal system (minimizing cost while meeting all of the requirements).
RAMS is a powerful tool to help you design and build fully optimized systems. Users have employed the software for performance analysis and design to achieve this objective across a wide variety of systems engineering applications including business processes, embedded systems, avionics, web services, and software development.
| RAMS Modeling | Page: 1 - 2 - 3 | Foresight's Approach to RAMS |