Using Conditional Containers

One of the advanced features in GoldSim is to make Containers conditional. Conditionality allows you to make a Container and all of its contents inactive until specific events occur and/or specific conditions are met.

Elements in an inactive container are “dormant”. That is, they are not updated or recalculated each timestep, and while they are inactive their output values never change. When other specific events occur and/or conditions are met, the Container (and its contents) can become active (and hence carry out their normal calculations). A conditional Container can activate and deactivate multiple times during a simulation.

Conditionality is a very powerful feature, and can be used to

• temporarily “turn off” certain parts of your model (e.g., during a testing phase);

• simulate processes or features which themselves only exist or are active during certain parts of your simulation; and

• simulate projects.

As an example, suppose that you wished to model a facility (e.g., a chemical plant) which had a contingency plan for repairs following some event (e.g., an accident). This contingency plan could be represented within a conditional Container, and the Container could then be activated when the event occurred. The Container representing the contingency plan would operate (accumulating costs and other consequences) until repairs were completed, and then deactivate (until another event occurred).

A simple example which illustrates the use of conditional Containers (ConditionalContainer.gsm) can be found in the Containers subfolder of the General Examples folder of your GoldSim directory (accessed by selecting File | Open Example... from the main menu). The folder also includes a more complex example of the use of conditional Containers to simulate projects (ProjectSimulation.gsm).