Dealing with time

It is quite usual in statecharts to find notations such as “after 30 seconds”, often expressed as specific events on a transition. Sismic does not support the use of these special events, and proposes instead to deal with time by making use of some specifics provided by its interpreter and the default Python code evaluator.

Every interpreter has an internal clock that is exposed through its clock attribute and that can be used to manipulate the time of the simulation.

The built-in Python code evaluator allows one to make use of after(...), idle(...) in guards or contracts. These two Boolean predicates can be used to automatically compare the current time (as exposed by interpreter clock) with a predefined value that depends on the state in which the predicate is used. For instance, after(x) will evaluate to True if the current time of the interpreter is at least x seconds greater than the time when the state using this predicate (or source state in the case of a transition) was entered. Similarly, idle(x) evaluates to True if no transition was triggered during the last x seconds.

These two predicates rely on the time attribute of an interpreter. The value of that attribute is computed at the beginning of each executed step based on a clock.

Note

The interpreter’s time is set by the clock each time execute_once() is called. Consequently, a call to execute() (that repeatedly calls execute_once()) could lead to macro steps with different time values, depending on the duration required to process the underlying calls to execute_once().

Interpreter clock

Sismic provides three implementations of Clock in its sismic.clock module. The first one is a SimulatedClock that can be manually or automatically incremented. In the latter case, the speed of the clock can be easily changed. The second implementation is a classical UtcClock that corresponds to a wall-clock in UTC with no flourish. The third implemention is a SynchronizedClock that synchronizes its time value based on the one of an interpreter. Its main use case is to support the co-execution of property statecharts.

By default, the interpreter uses a SimulatedClock. If you want the interpreter to rely on another kind of clock, pass an instance of Clock as the clock parameter of an interpreter constructor.

Simulated clock

The default clock is a SimulatedClock instance. Its current time value can be read from the time attribute. The clock starts at 0 and can either be manually changed by setting its time value, or automatically (after having called its start() method).

from sismic.clock import SimulatedClock

clock = SimulatedClock()
print('initial time:', clock.time)

clock.time += 10
print('new time:', clock.time)
initial time: 0
new time: 10

Note

Notice that time is expected to be monotonic: it is not allowed to set a new value that is strictly lower than the previous one.

To support pseudo real time, a SimulatedClock instance exposes two methods, namely start() and stop(). When the start() method is called, the clock measures the elapsed time using Python’s time.time() function.

from time import sleep

clock = SimulatedClock()

clock.start()
sleep(0.1)
print('after 0.1: {:.1f}'.format(clock.time))
after 0.1: 0.1

You can still change the current time value even if the clock is started:

clock.time = 10
print('after having been set to 10: {:.1f}'.format(clock.time))

sleep(0.1)
print('after 0.1: {:.1f}'.format(clock.time))
after having been set to 10: 10.0
after 0.1: 10.1

Finally, a simulated clock can be accelerated or slowed down by changing the value of its speed attribute. By default, the value of this attribute is set to 1. A higher value (e.g., 2) means that the clock will be faster than real time (e.g., 2 times faster), while a lower value slows down the clock.

clock = SimulatedClock()
clock.speed = 100

clock.start()
sleep(0.1)
clock.stop()

print('new time: {:.0f}'.format(clock.time))
new time: 10

Example: manual time

The following example illustrates a statechart modelling the behavior of a simple elevator. If the elevator is sent to the 4th floor then, according to the YAML definition of this statechart, the elevator should automatically go back to the ground floor after 10 seconds.

- target: doorsClosed
  guard: after(10) and current > 0
  action: destination = 0

Rather than waiting for 10 seconds, one can simulate this. First, one should load the statechart and initialize the interpreter:

from sismic.io import import_from_yaml
from sismic.interpreter import Interpreter, Event

statechart = import_from_yaml(filepath='examples/elevator/elevator.yaml')

interpreter = Interpreter(statechart)

The time of the internal clock of our interpreter is set to 0 by default. We now ask our elevator to go to the 4th floor.

interpreter.queue(Event('floorSelected', floor=4))
interpreter.execute()

The elevator should now be on the 4th floor. We inform the interpreter that 2 seconds have elapsed:

interpreter.clock.time += 2
print(interpreter.execute())

The output should be an empty list []. Of course, nothing happened since the condition after(10) is not satisfied yet. We now inform the interpreter that 8 additional seconds have elapsed.

interpreter.clock.time += 8
interpreter.execute()

The elevator must has moved down to the ground floor. Let’s check the current floor:

print(interpreter.context.get('current'))
0

Example: automatic time

If the execution of a statechart needs to rely on a real clock, the simplest way to achieve this is by using the start() method of an interpreter clock.

Let us first initialize an interpreter using one of our statechart example, the elevator:

from sismic.io import import_from_yaml
from sismic.interpreter import Interpreter, Event

statechart = import_from_yaml(filepath='examples/elevator/elevator.yaml')

interpreter = Interpreter(statechart)

Initially, the internal clock is set to 0. As we want to simulate the statechart based on real-time, we need to start the clock. For this example, as we don’t want to have to wait 10 seconds for the elevator to move to the ground floor, we speed up the internal clock by a factor of 100:

interpreter.clock.speed = 100
interpreter.clock.start()

We can now execute the statechart by sending a floorSelected event, and wait for the output. For our example, we first ask the statechart to send to elevator to the 4th floor.

interpreter.queue(Event('floorSelected', floor=4))
interpreter.execute()
print('Current floor:', interpreter.context.get('current'))
print('Current time:', int(interpreter.clock.time))

At this point, the elevator is on the 4th floor and is waiting for another input event. The internal clock value is still close to 0.

Current floor: 4
Current time: 0

Let’s wait 0.1 second (remember that we speed up the internal clock, so 0.1 second means 10 seconds for our elevator):

from time import sleep

sleep(0.1)
interpreter.execute()

We can now check that our elevator is on the ground floor:

print(interpreter.context.get('current'))
0

Wall-clock

The second clock provided by Sismic is a UtcClock whose time is synchronized with system time (it relies on the time.time() function of Python).

from sismic.clock import UtcClock
from time import time

clock = UtcClock()
assert (time() - clock.time) <= 1

Synchronized clock

The third clock is a SynchronizedClock that expects an Interpreter instance, and synchronizes its time value based on the value of the time attribute of the interpreter.

The main use cases are when statechart executions have to be synchronized to the point where a shared clock instance is not sufficient because executions should occur at exactly the same time, up to the milliseconds. Internally, this clock is used when property statecharts are bound to an interpreter, as they need to be executed at the exact same time.

Implementing other clocks

You can quite easily write your own clock implementation, for example if you need to synchronize different distributed interpreters. Simply subclass the Clock base class.

class sismic.clock.Clock

Abstract implementation of a clock, as used by an interpreter.

The purpose of a clock instance is to provide a way for the interpreter to get the current time during the execution of a statechart.

abstract property time

Current time

Return type

float

Delayed events

Sismic also has support for delayed events, i.e. events that will be triggered in the future.

When a delayed event is queued in an interpreter at time T with delay D, it is not processed by a call to execute() or to execute_once() unless the current clock time value exceeds T + D.

Delayed events can be created simply by providing a delay parameter when an Event instance is created, or when calling an interpreter’s queue() method.

from sismic.io import import_from_yaml
from sismic.interpreter import Interpreter

statechart = import_from_yaml(filepath='examples/elevator/elevator.yaml')
interpreter = Interpreter(statechart)

interpreter.queue('floorSelected', floor=4, delay=5)

Delayed events are not processed by the interpreter, as long as the current clock as not reach given delay.

print('Current time:', interpreter.clock.time)  # 0
interpreter.execute()
print('Current floor:', interpreter.context['current'])  # Still on ground floor
Current time: 0
Current floor: 0

They are processed as soon as the clock time value exceeds the expected delay:

interpreter.clock.time = 5
interpreter.execute()
print('Current floor:', interpreter.context['current'])  # Still on ground floor
Current floor: 4

Notice that the time when a delayed event will be processed is based on the time value of the clock when the queue() method is called, not the time attribute that corresponds to the time of the last executed step.

interpreter.clock.time = 6
print('Interpreter time:', interpreter.time)
print('Clock time:', interpreter.clock.time)

interpreter.queue('floorSelected', floor=2, delay=1)
Interpreter time: 5
Clock time: 6
interpreter.clock.time = 7
interpreter.execute()  # Event is processed, because 6 + 1 >= 7

print('Current floor:', interpreter.context['current'])
Current floor: 2