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Where do Team licenses fit in? For the first time I was without my team license, and to my horror discovered that you can't run experiments without a license if your model has anything more than: 16steps or 19objects, or 4models. I guess that means you can't distribute a model for "experimentation".

Slightly off topic, but I have never seen a model with a dynamic number of servers. Are you spawning servers on initialisation? And if so, should I assume you are using freespace? I make frequent use of dynamic entities and vehicles in freespace, but have never had much luck in terms of servers etc. I am sorry if I was ambiguous, I am not changing the number of servers, rather the number of entities within the servers at the starting time. I am not working in freespace.

I am working on a rather large model, and the starting conditions are rather important. I would like to establish exact start conditions prior to each excursion. For example, if I have 100 servers, I would like a certain number and type of entity in each server once I begin the run. Is it possible to establish this starting condition in some way? I cannot run my way to this condition due to both changes caused by random number generation and the unexplainable complexities that brought us to the current conditions.

Simio LLC is one of the rare places where you can work on the cutting edge of software technology and get to see the immediate results of your efforts. This is your chance to "get in on the ground floor" of a company that is changing the simulation market and is now taking off - adding customers and products. We are looking for bright, high energy, engaging people to help us design, develop, market, and deliver our simulation and scheduling software products to customers across the globe. We don't always have positions available, but we are steadily growing and we are often looking to hire into the following positions: Software Developer/ Software Developer Intern Requires a solid foundation in computer science (minimum BS in CS) and be on the cutting edge of .NET and SaaS technology. Will be working with C# and .NET in an agile environment to develop the engine, GUI, 3D animation, and delivery system for highly flexible simulation modeling and scheduling products. Must possess good communication skills and enjoy problem solving both independently and in team settings. Applications Engineer / Applications Engineer Intern We are looking for a highly versatile person to provide engineering support for the Simio software products. Responsibilities may include technical support, pre-sales support, consulting, testing, documentation, and training. Will be working in an agile environment as an integral part of the development team. Requires a minimum BS in Industrial Engineering, excellent written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to work both independently and in team settings. Inside Software Sales Representative / Inside Software Sales Representative Intern You will learn to use the telephone and email to uncover sales opportunities for the senior sales team. You will be making cold calls by telephone using a unique, non-intrusive approach developed over forty years. You will learn how to get to decision makers that make purchasing decisions. This entry level position seeks career sales professionals looking to advance to the position of senior sales representative and beyond. The position is open to energetic and motivated recent college graduates with a desire to break into software sales. Simio LLC is a fast growing B2B software company with a management team history of developing and selling market leading engineering software worldwide for the past thirty five years. Simio is introducing ground-breaking technology to the government and world's largest companies. Additional company information may be found at http://www.simio.com. Benefits for full time employees include Salary, Heath Insurance, Paid Vacation, and 401K with Matching Funds. Simio LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All positions above are located in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you are interested in any of the above positions, we are anxious to hear from you. Please send your resume, availability date, and salary requirements to careers@simio.com. Please put your last name and identify the position in the subject line.

Does your curriculum feature old, tired simulation software? Sure, its easy and convenient to teach the same thing year after year, but is that really the best for your students? In software terms, 20 years old is, well you know... -- Hinders your efforts to expose students to the latest in success tools and techniques. -- Damages your institution's reputation for being state-of-the-art. Solution -- Adopt state-of-the-art Simio that is guaranteed to breath new life into your simulation curriculum! We think you will find our academic program to be quite attractive. We make top quality, state-of-the-art software available to professors, students, and researchers at little or no cost. We have two academic products: Academic Version We provide full-capability software to academic institutions at no charge. We will provide as many licenses as you need for installation on any computers owned by an institution whose primary business is teaching. This software may be used in student labs as well as by professors and researchers. The activations supplied are generally for two years. It is expected that the licenses will be renewed on an annual basis, still at no charge. This software has no model size limits and is functionally equivalent to Simio Design Edition including discrete and continuous modeling, object library development, and 3D animation. Student Version We also provide full capability software for undergraduate and graduate student use on their own computers. We will supply the institution with a link that that can be passed on to students where they can obtain their own software and activations for a nominal fee. The activations supplied to students are for a full year. This software has no functional limits and is equivalent to Simio Design Edition. Academic License Limitations The above software may not be used for commercial work. This program makes top quality, state-of-the-art software available for academic use at little or no cost. It is only fair that companies who realize financial benefit from simulation should pay market value for any software and services required. Academic software may not be used to directly benefit a commercial entity. If any type of simulation results are shared privately outside the academic institution, then the application is considered to be commercial and a commercial software license must be used. Definition of Academic Organizations: Many commercial organizations such as service companies and hospitals also have an academic component that offers training or teaching. An organization will be considered to be commercial unless formal education is the primary service delivered or prior written authorization from Simio LLC is provided. People: Only currently enrolled students and currently employed professors/teachers are authorized to use academic software. Projects: We understand that student projects often involve commercial systems. Simulation results consist of the models, animations, reports, summarized results, and other similar artifacts of a simulation project. How results are used seems a reasonable way to differentiate commercial applications. •If any results are shared privately with the commercial organization, then the project will generally considered to be of commercial benefit and is an invalid use of academic software. In this case a commercial version of Simio must be used. •If all results pertaining to a project are either not shared or are made publicly available (such as a published thesis or undergraduate student projects published on a publicly accessible web site) then it is typically considered to be a valid use of academic software. •For borderline or questionable projects contact Simio for a predetermination or a possible exception to this policy. Get Started Now Review the Academic Quick Start Page for full information and a link to get the software today (request must be made by faculty member).

Tried free eval version of Csim20, the included console M/M/1 demo. CPU-time reported is 2.5 secs (same computer) for 1M jobs. A bit faster than the Javasim. Csim obviously does book-keeping of all arrival/departure times to show queueing averages, but this can be turned off, which is what I now want to do in SIMIO. Turn on statistics only for specified objects.

You can explore the contents of the Simio Standard Library by subclassing any object. You can do that by clicking on MySimioProject in the navigation window or by right clicking on any library object and selecting Subclass. The file itself is StandardLibrary.spfx and can be found in the MyDocuments\SimioModels folder. You should not change this file as it is automatically (re)generated any time its contents do not match what is expected.

Thanks for the suggestion. It now takes 30 seconds runtime for 1 million ... tokens, I guess that would be. First time I try this low-level approach. I followed your instructions (begin-seize-delay-release-tally). Read the Reference PDF as well. Added a Resource1 though (so there was something to seize?). Can see utilization of Resource1 (seems correct at .8321), but no queueing stats and cannot find any results from that Tally Statistics. Will continue to try. Still, I find it slow. I have a Javasimulation of an M/M/1 that takes only 4 seconds to run 1 million customers (=tokens/entities in Simio). Each customer has to be generated, wait for a resource (seize), delay, release it and ends up in a sink (that tallies). Same computer. The javasim has none of the GUI that Simio has, but then, there's no GUI processing overhead in FastForward/experiment mode. And, the Javasim reports queue and worker statistics (mean, variance). Perhaps Simio is collecting excessive statistics (if so, can it be turned off)? Or is it that I made a mistake by adding a Resource1 (to be seized)?

I see that the EXPERIMENT MODE is 2-4 times faster. I try this (one replication) and it runs slightly faster (109 runtime seconds compared to 115). One CPU ran at 90 %, the other at 10 %. I try to run two replications, now both CPUs run at 100 %. Runtimes are 121 and 124 seconds (wall clock time is about 125 seconds). So, I can see that experiment mode on my dual core CPU halves my waiting time when running experiments. But, each individual simulation is still 110-115 seconds runtime on a dual core CPU that is about 50 % utilized. I assume there is no way to speed up Simio further than this.

Update: As of Sprint 65, the software now contains DateTime functions that return a number representing a minute, hour, day, month or year based on a datetime input (such as TimeNow). There are also additional functions that convert a datetime to/from a string and those that let you determine which day of the week, month or year corresponds to a given datetime. See Help for more information on these new functions. Examples of these functions are: DateTime.Month(datetime) - which will return the month component, expressed as an integer between 1 and 12, for the specified datetime value (if you want the month of the current simulation time, put TimeNow in the parenthesis). DateTime.DaysInMonth(month, year) - which will return the number of days in the specified month and year. Specify the month as a number ranging from 1 to 12 and the year as a number ranging from 1 to 9999. DateTime.ToString(datetime) - which will return a formatted datetime string for the specified numeric datetime value. For example, 02/08/2012 00:00:21.

Jdoran, I have the same love-and-hate feeling towards Simio, I get a lot of user feeback from chinese community, some comments are really disappointing and let many people doubt simio’s capabilities. Many guys like you had quite bad experience starting using Simio, they don’t think Simio is so easy to grasp,not so intuitive and have many obstacles to solve the “unreasonable” demands, Lots of people tell me that tools like flexsim, automod, or even Plant Simulation rules( being the mostly used tool in china,especially academic worlds., that Simio is too crude.. But after two years of learning and modeling, I really begin to find the real value of a object-oriented process-driven tool like simio, it’s really efficient and the power is only limited to your imagination, But during modeling, I do bump into many unpleasant experiences like yours, ex.bugs, strange crash, slow opening and execution of large models. But thanks to god and thanks to SIMIO TEAMs, They input a lot of effort into customer feedback and I have confidence ,in a few years , I will proudly say, Simio RULES now  The good thing of being a reseller is that I can get a great deal of request and feedback for simio to grow..!

Hi, In order to extract date time infortmation from TimeNow, I combine the use of the FromDateTime and Substring functions. For example: To get the date in a MM/DD/YY format, I use : String.Substring(String.FromDateTime( TimeNow ),1, To get tim information in HH:MM:SS, I use : String.Substring(String.FromDateTime( TimeNow ),12, Happy Modeling,

Another way to be on the "early notice" list is to subscribe to forums. If you click on any forum, in the upper right there is a "Subscribe Forum" button. This will cause you to be notified each time there is new activity. You might want to do this for every forum of interest, and particularly for the SI Downloads forum where new sprints are often posted before being made available to the general public.

In the current version of Simio, there is no fixed relationship between simulated time and real time. The model will run as fast as possible given the contraints of the number of simulation events and related "work" being done. The two other things that most dramatically impact simulation speed are Trace (when trace is on it excuted slower) and Animation (3D animation with a low speed factor runs slower). We have plans to provide an Emulation product for use in training and testing. Before that product is created, we will add the capability for Simio to run in real time or any multiple of real time. Speed Factor can be used to speed or slow the animation. Its main purpose is to improve the quality of an animation by decreasing the factor. This also has the side effect of slowing the animation so you can see certain events more clearly. Conversely, if you increase the speed factor, the animation will run faster, but in doing so, certain events (like movement on a path) might become jumpy or too fast to observe. Fast-Forward can be used to temporarily disable animation to allow the model to execute much fsater. Running an Experiment provides the fastest execution possible. Not only is animation and user interaction turned off, but it will also take full advantage of all processors on a multiprocessor machine, often running 2-4 times faster.

You can use Simio at several levels. Here are a few: • You can build simple models entirely within a Process (limited or no use of library objects). • You can use the Standard Library. This was designed to make it easy to do the more common applications, but is not intended to do everything. This library will be enhanced and supplemented with other libraries in the future. • You can enhance the Standard Library Objects via add-on processes. This functionality is still under development, but processes will be easy to define to supplement the OnEntry and OnExit behavior. For example, you may want to collect and report custom statistics or have custom exit logic. • You can enhance/replace the Standard Library Objects by inheriting from them and modifying any of the predefined behavior. For example the Server currently only allows a single failure stream. You could create a new MyServer object that reproduces the included logic to support three failure streams. • You can create entirely new objects by inheriting from base class objects (like Fixed Object, Link, Node, and Intelligent Object). With this approach you can graphically define any combination of properties and behavior that you want using Steps and Elements inside Processes.

We are now sponsoring a blog to help each other become more successful in our simulation projects. We will be sharing information and initiating discussions that will prove interesting and helpful to both experienced and novice simulationists. If you are not experienced at "blogging" let me assure you that it is pretty easy to participate. 1) You can just check http://www.simio.com/blog from time to time and see what's new. 2) If you don't want to miss any content, you can sign up for the RSS feed. This will result in an email automatically sent to you with each new post (approximately weekly). To sign up, look for the RSS link at the very bottom of the blog pages or in your toolbar. Or simply go now to http://www.simio.com/blog/feed. 3) For the most enriching experience, participate! Look at the end of each posting for a link to enter your comments. Or if you want to suggest topics or even post your own topic, contact me - I'd love to have your participation. This blog is not about Simio or any particular product, nor is it intended to be in any way commercial or sales-oriented. Success in Simulation is available to all simulationists, as well as anyone who wants to become a simulationist or who just wants to learn more about simulation. While we expect to focus mainly on discrete event simulation, articles on the related fields of agent-based modeling, system dynamics, and emulation will also be included. The articles will be intentionally be kept short for a quick read, and will be written in an informal style for easy reading. I encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed so that you will automatically receive new articles as soon as they are posted.

You have joined an exclusive group. You have earned access to the inner workings of a great product. We are all very excited about our endeavor. It is way more than just a job... all of us on the team know that this is a special opportunity to change the simulation industry. And we are anxious to have you participate with us. As I mentioned in another post, Simio is a different type of company. One of those differences is that we recognize the significant value that YOU can offer. More than that, we are willing to "bare our sole" to you in an unprecedented way so that you have enough information to work with us. We know there is risk in this, but feel it is worthwhile so that we can produce truly stellar results. We know that your time is very valuable and we appreciate any time that you can spend to help. I would suggest that you start with the topics which are of greatest interest or those where you have the greatest expertise. We are interested in general feedback, novel ideas, mundane ideas (that we might otherwise overlook), feature requests, implementation suggestions... in short anything you offer, we want. If you think we need a new category or are otherwise missing some opportunity, please let me know. For most things I might suggest considering at least these four aspects: • What are the basic requirements (you would not use a product that did not have this)? • What would the ideal product look like? • Importance/urgency of the base feature and of any extended features. • How well the present proposal (if any) meets the needs Please remember that everything you read in here (whether posted by the Simio team or others) is protected by the Confidentiality Agreement. Please help us keep our evolving features confidential until they get to market. If our collective "novel ideas" trickle out into competitive products, it will weaken our ability to bring you the best possible product. Thanks again for your participation. Together we are defining a new state-of-the-art in simulation.

A common way to create object definitions in Simio is by combining other objects, for example combining machines and a robot to define a work cell object. This type of object is called a composed object because we create this object by combining two or more component objects. This object building approach is fully hierarchical, i.e. a composed object can be used as a component object in building higher level objects. A second, more basic method for creating objects in Simio is by defining the logical processes that alter their state in response to events. For example, a machine object might be built by defining the processes that alter the machine state as events occur such as part arrival, tool breakdown, etc. This type of modeling is similar to the process modeling done in traditional modeling systems in use today such as Arena or GPSS. An object that is defined by describing its native processes is called a base object. A base object can in turn be used as a component object for building higher level objects. The final method for building objects in Simio is based on the concept of inheritance. In this case we create an object from an existing object by overriding (i.e. replacing) one or more processes within the object, or adding additional processes to extend its behavior. In other words we start with an object that is almost what we want, and then we modify and extend it as necessary to make it serve our own purpose. For example we might build a specialized drill object from a generalized machine object by adding additional processes to handle the failure and replacement of the drill bit. An object that is built in this way is referred to as a derived object because it is sub-classed from an existing object. Regardless which method is used to create an object, once created it is used in exactly the same way. An object can be instantiated any number of times into a model. You simply select the object of interest and place it (instantiate it) into your model.

The Simio object framework is built on the same basic principles as object oriented programming languages; however these principles are applied within a modeling framework and not a programming framework. For example the Microsoft development team that designed C# applied these basic principles in the design of that programming language. Although these same principles drive the design of Simio, the result is not a programming language, but rather a modeling system. This distinction is important in understanding the design of Simio. Simio is not simply a simulation modeling tool that is programmed in an OOP language (although it is programmed in C#). Likewise it is not simply a set of classes available in an OOP language such as Java or C++ that are useful for building simulation models. Simio is a graphical modeling framework to support the construction of simulation models that is designed around the basic object oriented principles. For example when you create an object such as a “machine” in Simio, the principle of inheritance allows you to create a new class of machines that inherits the base behavior of a “machine”, but this behavior can be modified (overridden) and extended. Whereas in a programming language we extend or override behavior by writing methods in a programming language, in Simio we extend or override behavior by adding and overriding graphically defined process models. This distinction between object oriented modeling and object oriented programming is crucial. With Simio the skills required to define and add new objects to the system are modeling skills, not programming skills.

Simio is a simulation modeling framework based on intelligent objects. The intelligent objects are built by modelers and then may be reused in multiple modeling projects. Objects can be stored in libraries and easily shared. A beginning modeler may prefer to use pre-built objects from libraries; however the system is designed to make it easy for even beginning modelers to build their own intelligent objects for use in building hierarchical models. An object might be a machine, robot, airplane, customer, doctor, tank, bus, ship, or any other thing that you might encounter in your system. A model is built by combining objects that represent the physical components of the system. A Simio model looks like the real system. The model logic and animation is built as a single step. An object may be animated to reflect the changing state of the object. For example a forklift truck raises and lowers its lift, a robot opens and closes its gripper, and a battle tank turns its turret. The animated model provides a moving picture of the system in operation. Objects are built using the concepts of object orientation. However unlike other object oriented simulation systems, the process of building an object is very simple and completely graphical. There is no need to write programming code to create new objects. The activity of building an object in Simio is identical to the activity of building a model – in fact there is no difference between an object and a model. This concept is referred to as the equivalence principle and is central to the design of Simio. Whenever you build a model it is by definition an object that can be instantiated into another model. For example, if you combine two machines and a robot into a model of a work cell, the work cell model is itself an object that can then be instantiated any number of times into other models. The work cell is an object just like the machines and robot are objects. In Simio there is no way to separate the idea of building a model from the concept of building an object. Every model that is built in Simio is automatically a building block that can be used in building higher level models.