ModelicaDEVS constitutes a re-implementation of the PowerDEVS software, a tool that had been developed by Ernesto Kofman at the Universidad de Rosario in Argentina [2]. The graphical surfaces of the two implementations are almost identical. Yet, the simulation software embraced by the two implementations is founded on drastically different mechanisms. Whereas PowerDEVS implements Zeigler's hierarchical simulators, ModelicaDEVS operates on a set of simultaneous equations. For this reason, PowerDEVS is considerably faster in the execution of simulation runs. Dymola on the other hand enables the embedding of DEVS models in alternate modeling mechanisms that are supported by Dymola.
Both PowerDEVS and ModelicaDEVS were primarily developed for the simulation of continuous systems with state quantisation, rather than for the simulation of true discrete event-oriented systems. Consequently offers neither of the two software systems currently graphical modules for modeling waiting queues as well as for the generation of random numbers following distributions, as they are found frequently in discrete event-oriented simulations.