The College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) is a unique opportunity for college of engineering undergraduate students to engage in hands-on research with a faculty mentor while using critical thinking, collaborative, and entrepreneurial skills. SURP is an 8-week long program (can be non-contiguous), and students are expected to spend at least 20 hours/week working on their research projects and additional time preparing and presenting their poster for the annual SURP symposium; SURP students and their faculty mentor will agree upon a start date and timeline for their research project (with a suggested start date of June 26th, 2023). The goals of SURP are to: 

Project Title: Development of User Model Test Harness for the Horizon Simulation Framework

Faculty Email: emehiel@calpoly.edu

The Horizon Simulation Framework (HSF) is an open-source hybrid time/event driven Discrete Event Simulator (DES) that uses a Dynamic Programing, breadth-first approach to generate possible task-based schedules for dynamic systems written in C# and Python, and hosted on GitHub. The viability of each task on the schedule is determined by a system state-transition model developed by the user and written in Python. In short, the user provides a list of tasks to perform, a model of the system to simulate, and HSF generates an optimal schedule based on a user “value” function. As part of our ongoing work, we propose building a “test harness” that can be used by the person designing the Python system model. The proposed SURP project is for a student to develop, implement and test an HSF subsystem model test harness in Python. The test harness would take a user defined model, a set of initial conditions, and allow the user to develop and debug the subsystem model (through unit testing) before the model is consumed by HSF for full system simulation. Since the system model acts as a statetransition function, the student will also develop a formal Discrete Event Simulation Specification (DESS) for said HSF models and test harness. The formal DESS will advance the body of knowledge of DESS descriptions, as well as the goals and usability of the HSF project. The HSF project can be applied to many fields that require simulation, however our primary focus is on the modeling and simulation of space-based systems. Modeling and simulation tools and knowledge are in high demand within the Aerospace industry as a means to support Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) designs.

HOW TO APPLY: