  The PLATO satellite mission project is a next generation ESA Cosmic Vision
satellite project dedicated to the detection of exo-planets and to
asteroseismology of their host-stars using ultra-high precision photometry. The
main goal of the PLATO mission is to provide a full statistical analysis of
exo-planetary systems around stars that are bright and close enough for
detailed follow-up studies. Many aspects concerning the design trade-off of a
space-based instrument and its performance can best be tackled through
realistic simulations of the expected observations. The complex interplay of
various noise sources in the course of the observations made such simulations
an indispensable part of the assessment study of the PLATO Payload Consortium.
We created an end-to-end CCD simulation software-tool, dubbed PLATOSim, which
simulates photometric time-series of CCD images by including realistic models
of the CCD and its electronics, the telescope optics, the stellar field, the
pointing uncertainty of the satellite (or Attitude Control System [ACS]
jitter), and all important natural noise sources. The main questions that were
addressed with this simulator were the noise properties of different
photometric algorithms, the selection of the optical design, the allowable
jitter amplitude, and the expected noise budget of light-curves as a function
of the stellar magnitude for different parameter conditions. The results of our
simulations showed that the proposed multi-telescope concept of PLATO can
fulfil the defined scientific goal of measuring more than 20000 cool dwarfs
brighter than mV =11 with a precision better than 27 ppm/h which is essential
for the study of earth-like exo-planetary systems using the transit method.
