%T Simulation of gas pipeline networks
%A  Minesh Patel,  Paul Bentley,  Clifton Hughes
%E  Charlie Askew
%B OUG\-9: Occam and the Transputer \-\- Research and Applications
%X As part of the Alvey ParSiFal project, Logica Cambridge has
   been developing a model of a significant gas distribution
   network, in order to explore the potential for improvements
   in modelling speed using large numbers of transputers.There
   are two basic approaches to continuous simulation \- the
   explicit and the implicit. The implicit approach models an
   entire system as a set of equations. Current implementations
   are well suited to conventional mono\-processor machines but
   it is difficult to parallelize the algorithm and
   consequently to fully exploit the potential of
   transputers.The explicit approach models components such as
   pipes as individual objects which can be directly mapped
   into parallel processes, making it ideally suited to the
   transputer/occam architecture. However, explicit simulation
   is inherently expensive in terms of computational resources.
   To enhance performance we are also working on improvements
   to the model.We have developed a system using an explicit
   algorithm and have simulated networks ranging from 20 to
   500+ objects. Preliminary results indicate that the explicit
   algorithm can efficiently exploit high degrees of
   parallelism.