The DESpot help browser was created as a summer undergraduate research position in the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University. Funding provided by the Department and by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
Traversing this document is made easy by providing the user an index on the left hand side which lists all the pages contained in this help file. Several hyperlinks are also distributed among most of the pages which link to different sections of the document. Back, Forward and Home buttons as well as a search bar are provided at the top to quickly find what you are looking for. A search is performed on all the pages of the help browser using exactly what you type in (case insensitive). You can search for multiple terms by separating each search term with a comma. For example, if you search for "DESpot help", the search results will only contain pages with these two words together in that order. If you search for "DESpot, help" then you will be returned pages that contain both these words somewhere in the document. Throughout this document you will find screenshots of the DESpot application. These can be clicked on to enlarge the image for easier viewing. You can also use the print button in the toolbar to print the current page or the entire document.
To print this document click on the print button located in the toolbar of the Despot Help Browser. You have the option to print the current page you are viewing or the entire Despot Help document. You can also select whether you want images to be included in the print. If you are printing the entire document, you can chose Compact Form. By default, page breaks occur at the end of each topic when printing the entire document. If you select Compact Form, the page breaks will be removed and a new topic will occur directly after the previous topic has ended. Once you have selected the options you wish, click on the Print button and the Print Dialog will appear. This is where you can select your printer and printer settings.
At this point, you
have the option to print the document to a PDF. To print to a PDF file, click on the
button located to
the right of the Output File text box. This will open a file browser where you can choose the name and filepath
for the PDF. When you click save, you will be redirected back to the Print Dialog and now the Printer Name
will be Print to File (PDF). Clicking Print will output the document to the selected printer.
Despot Help File
Primary Author: Adam Brousseau
Supervisor: Dr. Ryan Leduc
Some content has been directly extracted from Magdin Stoica's original M.Eng project report:
Magdin Stoica, "DESpot – Unlock the DES potential," M.eng Project Report, Dept. of Computing and Software, McMaster University, 2007.
For more information about Discrete Event Systems see:
R.J. Leduc, "Hierarchical Interface-Based Supervisory Control with Data Events," International Journal of Control, vol. 82, no. 5, pp. 783 - 800, May, 2009.