We are very pleased to bring you Simio Release 5. Simio continues to introduce innovations that are changing the landscape of simulation and stimulating new development across the industry.
Many of our customers have cited Simio's flexibility, ease-of-use, and great support among the reasons why they have adopted Simio -- often switching so they can do things that are difficult or impossible with other products. This document describes the wealth of new features that have been recently added. Simio is ready to take on your most demanding modeling tasks.
Most software is developed under traditional techniques that often result in a rather modest set of features every year or two. Simio is developed in an aggressive agile environment that results in significant releases every three weeks and major releases about annually. While it is great fun regularly scaring the pants off the competition, it does make it hard to describe our progress - simply because there is so much to tell!
One of our major development efforts has been to continue advancing the state of the art in simulation-based planning and scheduling. Simio Enterprise Edition adds a powerful set of patent-pending features. You can use Enterprise as either a richer, more feature-packed, environment for general modeling, or you can use it to extend your simulation models into daily operational support. Extend the use and lifespan of your previously built Simio models or build and execute new models for Risk-based Planning and Scheduling (RPS). Custom-tailor reports, graphs, and tables for use by schedulers. Reduce your risk and costs by analyzing your schedules in ways never before possible.
Another major development effort was a Flow Library for modeling processes of bulk, mass, and liquid flows of materials. Simio employs a novel approach to modeling flow by allowing entities to change shapes and transfer weight or volume at a specified rate. Any entity in Simio can now be displayed either as symbol or as geometric shape that changes size with changes in volume. For example a pile of ore might be represented by a single entity that is displayed as a symbol that changes size as it transfers its volume to a new location over time.
Here is a small sampling of a few other things added since Version 4: Multi-objective optimization (yes, another industry first), free space movement enhancements (you no longer need to draw networks if you don't need them), AVI generation with camera scripting, flexible ride capacity and dwell time on vehicles, new support ribbon, crane library (multiple cranes, blocking prevention, acceleration, flexible cab movement, yep its all in there), support of units like mass, volume, and rates, over 70 new functions (including full calendar time support), several new steps, new SimBits, 122 extra pages of help, free on-line training videos, and much more!
We started off with a summary that was fifty pages long (whew!). To make it more digestible, we divided our releases chronologically into several subsections. Each of those sections can be found on the following links: