Limitations

Version 6.0-devel has the following limitations:

Release Limitations

Limitations in the Class Mechanism

The class mechanism is highly preliminary and is likely to change in future releases. There are several known problems:

Limitations in the Actor Libraries

Limitations in the PN Domain

The PN domain documents that it locally handles mutations. However, this is currently not true in the implementation. For the basic PN model, this doesn't really matter, since mutations happen pretty much the same as they would otherwise. (i.e. they are non-deterministic in when they execute) However, for timed PN models, there is actually some expressiveness lost, since timed PN models can locally execute mutations deterministically.

Embedding a PN typed composite actor inside a non-process top level such as DE does not work. In fact embedding a process domain inside a non-process domain is likely to have problems. Profess Lee wrote:

Yes, it looks as if the code is designed so that process domains (PN, CSP) can only be used within process domains. I'm not sure to what extent this is a limitation of the process domains vs. a semantic problem. What would PN mean within DE? Since PN has no well-defined notion of a "firing", how would you assign time stamps to the outputs of a PN actor? By default in DE, the time stamps of the outputs of an actor match those of the inputs that triggered the firing. There is no such notion in PN.

Limitations in the User Interface

Below are some of the limitations of Vergil, the Ptolemy II Graphical User Interface.

Limitations in JNI

  • The Interface to C actors using the Java Native Interface is not available via the Windows Installer (or Web Start). To use the JNI/Ptolemy II interface, you must download Ptolemy II as source files and compile.
  • The JNI user interface was removed between Ptolemy II 4.0 and Ptolemy II 6.0 because the UI stopped working.
  • Code Generation Limitations

    Code Generation limitations are covered on the Code Generation page.

    Missing Domains

    For limitations discovered after the release, see the Ptolemy II 6.0 website