Detection of Object Islands¶
If an object is not associated with any other objects in either direction, then it is quietly possible that this object (referred to as object island) is an unused object (garbage) in the model. Such garbage is typically left during model maintenance. While the garbage objects are normally ignored by most network applications, they shall be removed from the model to avoid confusion. If too many garbage objects are left, the size of the model could also be unnecessarily increased.
The object islands can be detected by running model validation. The validator marks the detected object islands as incidents of “Alert”. Users must turn on the “Alert” Type option to see them in the validation report, as illustrated below.
Users shall review each of the reported object islands and determine whether they are garbage objects or intentionally added for some reasons (such as for future modeling). If an object island is indeed a garbage object, it shall be deleted from the source of the model.
Network topology analysis provides another way to help users find the garbage objects by identifying network connection islands.