Ptolemy II 11.0.devel Release Notes

Ptolemy II is a set of Java packages supporting heterogeneous, concurrent modeling and design. Its kernel package supports clustered hierarchical graphs, which are collections of entities and relations between those entities. Its actor package extends the kernel so that entities have functionality and can communicate via the relations. Its domains extend the actor package by imposing models of computation on the interaction between entities. Examples of models of computation include discrete-event systems, dataflow, process networks, synchronous/reactive systems, and communicating sequential processes.

Ptolemy II includes a number of support packages, such as
data, providing a type system, data encapsulation and an expression parser,
plot, providing visual display of data,
math, providing matrix and vector math and signal processing functions, and
graph, providing graph-theoretic manipulations.

The Ptolemy Book describes the Ptolemy II design and the implementation of the Java classes.

Building Graphical Models describes how to use Vergil.

Complete List of Domains in Ptolemy II

Ptolemy II includes a growing suite of domains, each of which realizes a model of computation. It also includes a component library, in which most components are domain polymorphic, in that they can operate in several of the domains. Most are also data polymorphic, in that they operate on several data types. The domains that have been implemented are listed below.

Domains that are reasonably mature:

Domains that are still experimental:

Platforms

The core of Ptolemy II 11.0.devel is 100% Java, so it should work on any platform that has JDK 1.6 or later.

We developed Ptolemy II 11.0.devel under Mac OS X, Windows and Linux with JDK1.7.0_25 and JDK1.8.0_11 Under MacOS 10.7.5, we were also able to use Java 1.6.0_26.

Ptolemy II 10.0 will not compile under Java 1.3 because we use the java.lang.URI class, which is present only in Java 1.4 and later. JDK 1.5 or later is required so that these packages can use generics: backtrack, ptalon and others. JDK 1.6 is required because ptdb uses javax.swing.GroupLayout and because of other changes.

In the past, Ptolemy II has been compiled and run under IBM JDK 1.6.0. However, the IBM JDK has not be tried recently. There are the following limitations under IBM JDK 1.6.0

Ptolemy II 11.0.devel Highlights

Contents:

Highlights

Below are the highlights of this release.

Highlight1

Description

References

Highlight1 Demonstrations

New demonstrations

Demo1

Models of Computation

New Model of Computation or New Demos

Actor Demonstrations

New Actor Package

New Demonstrations for other facilities

New Facility

Other Key New Capabilities

New and Enhanced Actor Libraries

Additional Features

Additional Feature

Other new classes

Works in Progress

Bug fixes

For the current list of bugs, see Ptolemy II Bugs
and Kepler Bugs.

A few features and classes were removed outright.

director
Why and what to use instead.

Backward Compatibility

Most models developed under Ptolemy II 1.0.1, 2.0.1, 3.0.2, 4.0.1, 5.0.2 or HyVisual 2.2-beta, 3.0, 4.0.1, 5.0.1, 6.0.2, 7.0.1, 8.0.1 and 10.0.1 should run under Ptolemy II 11.0.devel

The MoMLParser includes a list of backward compatibility filters that make certain changes on models when read, handling such issues as actors being moved or renamed and parameter names being changed. The filters themselves are defined in ptolemy.moml.filter. If you have developed your own actors under earlier versions of Ptolemy II by writing your own Java files, you should recompile all your java code with the new release. In theory, copying the .class files should work, but recompiling is safer.

Features that were new in previous Ptolemy II releases

Features that were new in previous Ptolemy II releases

Limitations

Version 11.0.devel has the following limitations:

Release Limitations

Limitations in the Class Mechanism

There are several known problems:

Limitations in the Actor Libraries

Limitations in the PN Domain

The PN domain documents that it locally handles mutations. However, this is currently not true in the implementation. For the basic PN model, this doesn't really matter, since mutations happen pretty much the same as they would otherwise. (i.e. they are non-deterministic in when they execute) However, for timed PN models, there is actually some expressiveness lost, since timed PN models can locally execute mutations deterministically.

Embedding a PN typed composite actor inside a non-process top level such as DE does not work. In fact embedding a process domain inside a non-process domain is likely to have problems. Profess Lee wrote:

Yes, it looks as if the code is designed so that process domains (PN, CSP) can only be used within process domains. I'm not sure to what extent this is a limitation of the process domains vs. a semantic problem. What would PN mean within DE? Since PN has no well-defined notion of a "firing", how would you assign time stamps to the outputs of a PN actor? By default in DE, the time stamps of the outputs of an actor match those of the inputs that triggered the firing. There is no such notion in PN.

Limitations in the User Interface

Below are some of the limitations of Vergil, the Ptolemy II Graphical User Interface.

Limitations in JNI

Code Generation Limitations

Code Generation limitations are covered on the Code Generation page.

Missing Domains

For limitations discovered after the release, see the Ptolemy II 11.0.devel website

Last Updated: $Date: 2015-01-28 06:14:50 +0100 (Wed, 28 Jan 2015) $