Using a simulator for testing and validating a newspaper production decision support system

The paper presents and discusses the use of a software simulation tool for testing and validating a production decision support system. The developed simulator is specially designed for simulation of the entire newspaper production process. The authors propose methods for testing and validating a global production management system (GPMS), before implementing it in the production environment. Newspaper production is a complex time-critical process characterized by heterogeneous computer based production tools in a distributed environment. A GPMS is an application of decision support systems for the entire newspaper production process, and needs to collect events from various production subsystems to get the current production state. In order to test a GPMS without disturbing the daily production, there is a need for a simulation tool which must simulate the event providers. This can only be achieved by using a strictly specified communication mechanism between the event providers and the GPMS.