Documentation

European Commission Directorate-General for Research :
Position paper on declarative modelling

Dr. Robert Muetzelfeldt, an honorary fellow of the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, and a founder of Simulistics Ltd., was commissioned by the European Commission Directorate-General for Research, Sustainable development, global change and ecosystems, to prepare a “Position paper on declarative modelling in ecological and environmental research”. This paper is a comprehensive analysis of the merits of declarative modelling, and the opportunities it presents. - 981 kB

European Journal of Agronomy :
The Simile visual modelling environment

For an overview of Simile, and in particular its application to agro-ecological simulation models, the best place to start is a recent article in the European Journal of Agronomy, entitled “The Simile visual modelling environment”. - 275 kB

Getting to know Simile

For a more detailed view of Simile, and the motivation behind it, the best place to start is with the document “Getting to know Simile”. - 715 kB

This document also contains several examples of how various ecological modelling topics are tackled in Simile, including the modelling of energy flow in ecosystems, population dynamics, and landuse change.

How Simile Works

Here is a document explaining how Simile constructs and executes the programs that run its models. We hope that this will serve to elucidate the behaviour of models containing combinations of Simile's special features. “How Simile Works”. - 559 kB

Manual for PEST Freeware parameter estimation tool

Since version 4.5, Simile includes a graphical tool to allow parameter estimation to be carried out using PEST from within Simile's model execution environment. This enables Simile users to do various kinds of model analysis without needing to know about PEST's file formats etc. Since the latest edition (5th) of the PEST manual does not appear anywhere else on the web, and the license allows its duplication with acknowledgement, we include it here. - 1.9MB

Presentations

These presentations are provided, “as is”, in case they may be found useful. They were made for Simile version 3 and so the screen shots are out of date, however, the concepts remain the same.

• Ecological modelling with Simile: 1
  (Introduction to ecological modelling, Introduction to Simile, System Dynamics in Simile)
• Ecological modelling with Simile: 2
  (Introduction to submodels, Submodels for modular modelling, Multiple-instance submodels)
• Ecological modelling with Simile: 3
  (Population submodels)
• Ecological modelling with Simile: 4
  (Conditional submodels, Association submodels)

On-line help

Comprehensive documentation of the Simile visual modelling software is provided with the software help file, which is also available to browse on-line.