Instance hierarchy

The instance hierarchy in ASCEND is the representation that your MODEL has after it has been compiled and instantiated. The instance hierarchy is actually a directed acyclic graph (DAG), because ASCEND's compilation process (see Developer's Manual) does some merging of instances according to that indicated by ARE_THE_SAME, ALIASES, WILL_BE and so on.

When viewing the instance hierarchy using the PyGTK GUI, one is actually navigating the names of the variables, relations, etc in the model and sub-model declarations; this is subtly different from the instance hierarching because of the merging effect mention above.

See also MODEL.