WITNESS in the hands of an expert system

Model-building, experimentation and results analysis are the main tasks of any simulation process, and all these activities need specific expertise. To assist in this area, several advisory systems have been developed and reported in the literature. In this article the authors present an expert system framework for assisting in the process of simulation with models written using verison 5 of the WITNESS visual interactive modelling package. The expert system, written using the XI-Plus shell, inspects the simulation model, prepares a set of appropriate experiments and assists the user in identifying the best model configuration.