SRCompiler: Translating Stella dynamic models to open-source R scripts

Stella Architect (iSee Systems) offers an object-oriented environment that facilitates the development of dynamic models. Stella, however, does not support some of the advanced mathematical tools that can be found in mathematical software such as R. Moreover, R is open source, contains numerous libraries and resources, and is used by a large community. However, building dynamic systems, which typically use a large number of differential or difference equations, are more difficult to build in R. To take advantage of both Stella and R, we have developed the SRCompiler (Stella-R Compiler), which is a translator that exports models built in Stella into R scripts. In 2012, a translator from Stella to R was developed based on plain text treatment for Stella, but it had some limitations such as scalability and error handling. Nevertheless, our approach is more versatile, scalable and expandable since it is based on compiler design, defines a formal language, and uses the latest Stella version (v. Architect).In this paper, a classical predator-prey model has been modelled in Stella to show an applied example. Following the translation of the Stella model into R, all the parameters of the model (6 in total) have been optimised to fit model output to the Hudson Bay Company’s hare-lynx time series hunting data (1847-1935). Software availability Name of software: SRCompiler SRCompiler Developers: Pastor Héctor.M, Morales Enrique Web page: https://github.com/hmpp91/SRCompiler Available: 2021 Program language: C++ Program size: 197 KB Availability and cost: Open source