Possible to prematurely stop single workers in a parsim simulation

I am running a parsim simulation for a simulink model in R2023B. Here, I experience single workers getting stuck in the simulation, during compilation or in a 'queued' state, some of these later aborting the simulation.

For exploratory simulation, it is not necessary for my simulation run to have every simulation successfully run, I can tolerate a few fails for overall speed gain.

So, my idea would be to set a timeout for each simulation and prematurely stop the simulation, ideally with a timeout error for later processing, if the overall worker occupation of a single run exceeds a set time. This should include queueing and compilation.

I have found this related article on stopping the whole pool using a postSimFunction, and plan to use this to evaluate the run time of each other worker after one simulation has finished, stopping these that take too long.

However, I fail to measure single worker duration and aborting a single simulation on a worker from this postSimfunction. Are there any good ways on how to do that?

If that cannot be done, is it possible to place some form or real-time clock in a simulink simulation to detect simulation duration and finish the simulation based on that criterion?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

[BW]

Inspired by your answer, I've created a MATLAB function block that measures the real-time duration and if the time surpassed the input argument in sec, sends a signal to a 'stop' block. This works quite well for me as of now and (except for the workers getting stuck before starting) solves the hangs:

function stopsim = fcn(max_time)

persistent starttime;

if isempty(starttime)

starttime=tic;

end

timediff=toc(starttime);

if timediff>max_time

stopsim=1;

else

stopsim=0;

end

Thank you again for your help on this!

Answer 2

[Jaimin]

Hi @BW

You can add a clock block to your Simulink model to measure the simulation time. Combine this with a custom block or MATLAB Function block that checks the elapsed time and terminates the simulation if it exceeds a certain threshold.

Kindly refer following code snippet for understanding.

function stopSimBasedOnTime(block)
    % Custom MATLAB Function Block
    maxSimTime = 300; % Maximum allowed simulation time in seconds
    elapsedTime = block.CurrentTime;
    
    if elapsedTime > maxSimTime
        set_param(bdroot, 'SimulationCommand', 'stop');
    end
end

Use model callbacks like “StartFcn” or “StopFcn” to initialize and check the simulation time, respectively.

For more information kindly refer following MathWorks documentation.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/simulink/ug/what-is-a-matlab-function-block.html

I hope this will be helpful.

[BW]

Thank you very much for your answer Jaimin, but I am rather looking for a means to measure the real-time duration of a simulation instead of the simulation time. Your anwer is however much along the lines of what I need, I wonder if this can be done with real-time measurement instead?

[BW]

Furthermore, it might be that this would not help if a worker gets stuck in the 'compilation done' phase.