XPSL, eXtensible Pipeline Simulation Language, based upon XML, is intended to provide a common language for communicating information to and from pipeline simulation applications. While in previous years, the Standards Committee has presented and demonstrated concepts and solicited ideas and input, the 2005 PSIG conference will be the first time that the XPSL standards will be presented in a concrete, ready to use format. This paper describes the basic concepts embodied in the XPSL language. This paper also announces and describes a set of XPSL language documents that are available on the PSIG web site. Note: At the time of writing the XPSL documents were still being finalized. An updated version of this paper will be provided as part of the XPSL documentation once the documents are finalized. The goal of the XPSL Standards Committee is to work with vendors and users to develop a standard that meets their needs. A second goal is to encourage the adoption and real use of this standard. Since the 2004 conference, the committee has revised the following PSIG documents:
PSIG 001/2004 XPSL: Configuration Objects: Recommendation Document
PSIG 002/2003 Data Model for Simulation Outputs The committee has also developed the following PSIG documents
PSIG 001/2005 XPSL: Units
PSIG 002/2005 XPSL: Language Guidelines Document This paper presents some key concepts embodied in XPSL. The current versions of the individual documents are available on the PSIG web site. A number of XPSL examples will also be presented with this paper and will be available on the PSIG web site as well.
PSIG members have recognized for some time the difficulty of maintaining multiple representations of pipeline configurations for different applications. Configurations could not be shared between applications, even between applications provided by the same application vendor. Similarly, their has been no effective way to share information provided by these various applications since there was no standard for representing output data. XPSL has been designed to provide a common language for input and output to pipeline simulation applications. It could also be used in a stand-alone form as the basis for a pipeline configuration database. XPSL is the culmination of several years of discussion and growing momentum supporting this effort. XPSL, eXtensible Pipeline Simulation Language, is built using standard XML, eXtensible Markup Language. XML has become the de facto standard for information sharing, not just on the internet, but between applications of all types on local or networked computers. The benefits of using XML as the base for XPSL are many.
