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This page contains status reports
on SimPy.
It also shows the current SimPy development and release plans.
2008 Status Reports
An important activity during this year will be the testing (and, where
necessary, adaptation) of SimPy under Python 3.0.
Also, it is expected that the SimPy book will be finalized and published.
 | March |
The bug-fix release SimPy 1.9.1 was published. It cures two bugs, both of
which were found and reported by members of the SimPy user community.
This release also adds the new "SimPy Simplified" manual which Tony Vignaux
has been developing for first courses on SimPy and beginning users.
| January |
After community testing, SimPy 1.9 was released. This version is based on
many important contributions from SimPy community members:
Prof. Norm Matloff and his team of graduate students
proposed improved event handling. Prof. Tony Vignaux added a great idea to
speed up the handling of cancelled event notices. Many users contributed
performance measurement results which helped with deciding on the new event
list handling approach.
Virgil Stokes proposed code for the new Monitor and Tally
methods which return the time-weighted variance of observations.
Tony Vignaux proposed an abbreviated method for activating
processes.
Thanks to all of you!
2007 Status Reports
| December |
The beta version of SimPy 1.9 was published on SourceForge. The user
community was requested to test this version.
| August |
The in-depth editing of the two Bank tutorials included in the SimPy
distribution has been completed and has resulted in even better training
documents.
Experimentation and performance measurement aimed at speeding up SimPy have
been completed. The results look promising: depending on model size and
scenario, speed improvements of 10..50% are achievable, using either the
bisect or the heapq package from the Python library. The SimPy user
and developer communities will be involved in evaluating the findings and
deciding on which package to employ for a future faster SimPy version.
| June |
Tony Vignaux is doing a major editing job of the Bank tutorials and the
programs they include.
Approaches to speeding up future versions of SimPy by using a faster
implementation of event list sorting are being studied. These are based on
outstanding, innovative work by Professor Norm Matloff (U. of California at
Davis) and a group of his students.
| January |
On January 2007, SimPy 1.8 was published. It is a major
release, with additional capabilities, new/improved documentation, and bug
fixes.
SimPy 1.8 is based on inputs (feature requests and proposed code) from a
number of SimPy users. Thanks to all these users!
A Release Candidate (SimPy 1.8RC) was submitted to the SimPy community
for testing.
2006 Status Reports
| June |
On June 15, SimPy 1.7.1 was published. It is a minor (maintenance)
release, fixing a few bugs found in 1.7.
Inputs have been sought from the user community for the additional
functionality of the next major release, SimPy 1.8. See
this page on the SimPy wiki.
SimPy developers are writing a book with the working title "Simulation in
SimPy". The book addresses SimPy capabilities from the simulation modeler's
point of view. Publication form and date are still undecided.
SimPy Manual and Cheatsheet are currently being edited by a small team
with a view to improving clarity and structure. This improved documentation
will be part of SimPy 1.8.
| March |
On March 16, SimPy version 1.7 was published. The test/evaluation process
of SimPy 1.7beta was supported by the large number of users who downloaded
it. Thank you all!
No program errors were found by the testers, but the feedback provided
led to improvement of the user documentation.
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February |
After discussions within the SimPy community, SimPy
1.7beta was finalized and published on 8 February, 2006 for user feedback.
This major release brings new constructs (classes Level and Store,
yield put and yield get) with a view to broadening SimPy's
applicability to more complex scenarios such as master/slave and
multi-process cooperations.
The discussion took place on the SimPy lists and on the SimPy wiki.
With a view to making the base for development and code review broader, a
new mailing list (simpy-checkins) has been started. It disseminates
information about all new code or documentation checkins into the SimPy CVS.
2005 Status Reports
| February |
On February 2, SimPy version 1.5.1 was published. It brought no API
changes, but an important licensing change, namely to Lesser GPL (from GPL
originally). This change was made after discussion and voting in the SimPy
community.
| June |
On June 11, SimPy version 1.6 was published. It adds two new 'yield'
statements to the API. These cater for the modeling of reneging
processes (processes giving up queuing for a resource before acquiring it,
e.g. because of a timeout). Syntactically, these statements are compound
statements, combining two reactivation conditions with a logical OR. This
form may be used in future versions for additional 'yield' statements for
new capabilities, if the user community sees a need.
| November |
On November 20, SimPy version 1.6.1 was published. It does not add any
simulation scheduling facilities, but rather provides new support for space-
and time-efficient collection and analysis of large simulation data sets.
This minor release has been specified and developed in close cooperation
with many members of the SimPy user community. The SimPy wiki has been a
great collaboration service for this. Special thanks for their contributions
are due to, amongst many other users, Goedson Teixeira Paixão, Leo
Szumel, Mario Domenech Goulart and Matt Leslie.
2004 Status Reports
| February |
On February 1, SimPy version 1.4 was published, bringing much more
functionality (e.g. GUI and plotting). At the same time, the web site was
totally redone with a view to providing better services to SimPy users through
more frequent content updates, SimPy model examples and "how to"s.
| March |
A maintenance release (v. 1.4.1) has been published on March 2. It fixes two bugs,
improves the unit test and also uses only Unix-friendly file names.
| May |
A maintenance release (v. 1.4.2) has been published on May 25. It fixes
several minor bugs (accidental omission of the Histogram class from
SimulationTrace, SimulationRT and SimulationStep; failing test in testSimpy.py),
broadens the unit test coverage to compatibility testing between SimulationXXX
modules and Simulation, updates the Bank manual and repairs an error in the
SimulationTrace manual.
| June |
A SimPy wiki has been started (http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/cgi-bin/wiki/SimPy?SimPy).
| July |
With a view to showing potential extensions/new idioms of SimPy and
initiating discussions in the community, a section on experimental SimPy
constructs has been started on this site (see
SimPylab). It will serve as a laboratory environment for SimPy and is
intended to help in identifying useful changes/additions and avoiding
"feature bloat".
| September |
Development of SimPy version 1.5 has been started, to be released in the
autumn of 2004. Apart from minor bug-fixes, cleanups and optimizations, SimPy
1.5 will introduce new process scheduling constructs, namely events with
signals, and a general wait-until capability.
| December |
After a successful alpha review period (which showed up one bug in SimEvent),
SimPy 1.5 has been completed and published.
The wiki is showing a lot more life now. SimPy download numbers are very
strong.
2003 Annual Status Report
In 2003, two releases were published, version 1.2 (in April) and version 1.3
(in June). In version 1.3, the source distributions for the first time were
prepared using Python's distutils.
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