Teaching scheduling and routing algorithms through animations with the JMCH component of JMT

This paper focuses on describing a new feature of the Java Modelling Classroom Helper (JMCH), one of the tools of the Java Modelling Tools (JMT) suite, which aims to provide better educational potential in teaching scheduling and routing policies within queueing networks. A controlled animation scenario has been implemented that allows users to follow the behavior of the algorithms via graphical animation through an intuitive user interface and evaluate their performance. Users are gradually introduced to the complexity of the scheduling algorithms, and learn the impact of each policy decision as they go through the implemented models. Several scheduling and routing algorithms are considered together with four distributions of service times and arrival processes. The results of the animated model are summarized in tables and compared with the values of the correspondent metrics obtained by simulation with JSIM.