A.D. Achlama develops, markets, and supports Annabelle™ – the most advanced and powerful software available for evaluating requirements and performance of complex systems, such as military fleets or industrial plants. Annabelle™ allows describing the system in terms of its hierarchical structure, and simulating its behavior for any given scenario of design, operations, and maintenance parameters.
The combined power of modeling language and simulation algorithms makes Annabelle™ an ideal choice for modeling complex military, industrial and logistics systems.
Annabelle™ emerged as a result of a multi-year research and development program, aimed at the development of a capability for accurate modeling and performance estimation of complex systems, typically encountered in military and industrial logistics applications.
The software uses time-dependent Monte Carlo techniques to simulate the behavior of the modeled system. An analysis of complex systems requires two major elements: an accurate modeling and a stochastic simulation.
The Annabelle™ simulation engine employs elaborate transport algorithms, which determine the timing and nature of the next event based on the current state of the system and time-to-event probability distributions associated with various on-going processes. The ages of various components, being one of the most important aspects of the system state, are explicitly taken into account.
VERSATILITY OF MODEL DESCRIPTION
The transport algorithms are powerful enough to accurately calculate different performance measures of the model which they work on. The intent to fully realize the inherent potential of these algorithms caused the versatility of the model description to become the most important singular objective during Annabelle™’s research and development program.
Annabelle’s Workspace
The multilevel structural hierarchy of objects and multiple spatial locations are among the principal features of the real world that are explicitly represented within the Annabelle™ model.
Structural composition, Logistic map and Output windows – a comprehensive approach
to problem solving
Dealing with the multilevel structural trees, which may be composed or decomposed at the modeler’s will, led to the development of a suitable modeling language of a high resolving power.
Powerful modeling language
General features of Annabelle™ include:
The object-oriented modeling approach
Unlimited numbers of indenture levels and sites
Multiple system types
Varying number of objects
Object floats
Different coexisting mission profiles
Resource management
And in addition: lateral support, attrition, battle damage, foreign object damage, cannibalization, mission readiness states , macros (reusable patterns of behavior/code), instant versus regular actions, activity levels, connectivity states, run-time debugger and analyzer with complete model visibility.
ANSWERING A WIDE VARIETY OF QUESTIONS
One of the key concepts in Annabelle™ is the Entity Set. These sets are used for addressing entities, as objects of command applications, in defining tallies and for other purposes. Annabelle™ provides for advanced mechanisms that support the user in devising his/her own sets of tallies. The user may define tallies with respect to any identifiable set of entities. For example, first the user defines and names the set of all devices that belong to a certain structural type and reside in a particular location. Next, he/she tallies (by asking) the probability that a device in this set is in the specified internal state.
Specifically, the program allows defining and calculating: object-related tallies, event-related tallies, time-related tallies, histograms, “sensitivity” tallies, and many more.
Equipped with its robust transport algorithms and powerful modeling language, Annabelle™ allows answering a variety of questions routinely asked by a reliability or logistics engineer, producing such estimates as availabilities of the given equipment at the specified locations, number of spares at storages, failure counts, inter-location equipment flows, life cycle expenditures, and the like.
SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS
The modeling mechanism of Annabelle™ does not limit the user as to the number of different types of objects coexisting within the same model, and lets him/her provide any of these objects with the desired degree of individuality, using both value and process attributes.
As a result, the "system of systems" paradigm becomes a natural part of the Annabelle model. Moreover, any object may be prescribed a specified individual behavior, enabling definition of elaborate scenarios. This allows significantly enhancing the realm of models by adding the operational aspect to the classical logistic factors. Thus, the measures may be calculated, such as the availability of aircraft above the specified location, or time-dependent load in a communication channel.
OPTIMIZATION CAPABILITY
In addition to its modeling and simulation capabilities AnnabelleTM solves optimization problems by analyzing simulation output - providing rapid and accurate answers. This is done using unique self-learning hybrid approach that leverages the best of both analytic and simulation methodologies. As a result the optimal recommendations for both spare parts (LRUs and SRUs) and resource units may be obtained. The models may contain LRU-SRU structures, and operate with multiple-level repair logic.
Unique hybrid optimization approach
EFFICIENT MULTI-CORE CALCULATION ABILITY
A.D. Achlama is developing its new, leading edge technology, the Multi-core edition of Annabelle.
The multi-core edition will allow for parallel processing thereby significantly reducing simulation times. As a result, running times of even sizeable and complicated models will become moderate or small. Degree of simulation time reduction will depend upon the number of cores (CPUs) of the computer. Our preliminary tests showed that calculation times on a computer with 6 cores were reduced by the factor of 5.7.
At the first step the multi-core processing will be fully implemented for both General and Optimizer (Mode 1/2) Scenarios of Annabelle. The expected release time of this new edition is June 2012.
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