Quantity Manager actors.

The Metropolis project introduced the notion of "quantity manager," a component of a model that functions as a gateway to another model. For example, a purely functional model that describes only idealized behavioral properties of a flight control system could be endowed with a quantity manager that binds that functional model to a model of a distributed hardware architecture using a particular network fabric. By binding these two models, designers can evaluate how properties of the hardware implementation affect the functional behavior of the system. For example, how does a time-triggered bus protocol affect timing in a distributed control system, and how do the timing effects change the dynamics of the system? Similarly, a functional model could be endowed with a quantity manager that measures power usage and identifies potential overloads that may result from unexpectedly synchronized interactions across a distributed system.

@since Ptolemy II 8.1