Event Graphs: Syntax, Semantics, and Implementation

Abstract

This tutorial aims to introduce Event Graphs (EGs), invented 40 years ago by Lee Schruben to allow eventbased modeling of discrete dynamic systems. Their simplicity and naturalness in causality modelling and simulation modelling made EGs popular in research and practice. In a simulation, an event causes state changes in a system as well as other events to happen in the future. EGs provide a parsimonious diagram representation for the Event Scheduling paradigm of Discrete Event Simulation. We first introduce their visual syntax and informal semantics, and then present a recent extension by adding objects to EGs. Our tutorial also includes an introduction to the formal semantics of EGs and a Python implementation for executing EGs. © 2023 IEEE.