Understanding Event Triggering

All discrete event modeling involves triggering of one form or another. When you trigger an element, you are telling it that a discrete event has occurred that you want the element to respond to. Therefore, before describing the details of the various elements associated with discrete event modeling, it is first necessary to understand the concept of triggering.

The following element types can be triggered in GoldSim:

• Triggered Event

• Event Delay

• Stochastic

• Status

• Milestone

• Decision

• Random Choice

• Discrete Change

• Extrema

• Conditional Containers

(Specialized elements within some of the GoldSim extension modules, such as the Reliability Module and the Financial Module, can also be triggered.)

Each of these elements responds to a trigger in a different way. They are, however, all triggered in the same way. That is, these elements all share a common Triggering dialog, which controls how they are triggered. The Triggering dialog is accessed via a button in the dialog for each element:

Note: Depending on the element, the label for the trigger button will not always be “Trigger…”.

Note: Holding your cursor over the trigger button displays a tool-tip summarizing the current trigger settings.

The Triggering dialog for every element looks like this:

Note that for some elements, an additional button (for specifying Resource interactions) is available on the Trigger dialog:

The Triggering dialog is discussed in detail in the topics below.