Slots in RPL

Slots in RPL

slot

A slot is a position in a group, series, or sequence. It can also refer to a specific place or position within an assembly or machine. The term is derived from the fact that slot machines use mechanical reels to spin, with symbols being inserted into positions on those reels by the player using a lever or button (either physical or on a touchscreen). The symbols are then displayed to the player and if a winning combination appears, the player receives credits based on the payout table for that machine.

A scalar slot represents a single numeric value that does not change over time. This is useful for holding input data parameters such as the model parameter values for a simulation. A scalar slot is configured in the Slot dialog box and can be undocked into its own Slot Viewer. See Slot Dialog Functionality and Slot Viewer Functionality for details.

The Periodic Slot is a specialized table slot that can hold periodic data. These slots have period and interval configuration that can be accessed via the View, Configure Period menu. They are accessed in RPL like other tables, and when a value is referenced at a timestep outside of the range of the Periodic Slot’s configured timeseries portion, it will interpolate or lookup depending on the configuration.

In addition to the Periodic Slot’s configuration options, this slot has a number of other features that distinguish it from other table slots. A periodic slot’s rows can be accessed in RPL with the syntax: DateTime: Slot[row>] or Slot[DateTime>]. The row definitions for these slots are different from other table slots, but they are configured in the same way.

Statistical table slots can define either curves (2-Dimensional) or surfaces (3-Dimensional). They may be configured with compression modes that affect how the values in a set of snapshots are compressed together and may have a range limit that controls how far away from a target value a value must be to be considered valid during simulation. They can also be configured to show warning messages if a simulation set value violates a convergence setting. The settings for these are accessed in the lower portion of the Configure Slot dialog as shown below.