5.3.2 The VISTA Simulation Flow Control

In the VISTA framework [37] simulators of different vendors can be integrated and used with a common graphical user interface. An important module of the VISTA framework is the Simulation Flow Control (SFC) [38] which enables the automatic invocation of an arbitrary number of process simulators to simulate complete process flows. File format conversion for simulators from different vendors is done automatically between the simulator invocations.

When simulating several variants of a process flow in which only few modifications have been introduced the results of previous simulation runs which are not influenced by the modifications can be reused to save CPU time.

With this approach it is easily possible to introduce variations of certain process parameters and to efficiently simulate a large number of different devices with a minimum of user interaction.