[CLOSED] Just a general topic about Simio vs Arena

[jdoran]

Today I had to do a quick and dirty model in Arena. I just thought I would take this opportunity to do a quick post on my findings. By no means is this a comprehensive analysis of the two tools, but I just felt like sharing my opinion of the two.

Being the predecessor to Simio, it is natural to compare the two tools, and even after using Arena for the short amount of time I did... the differences were astounding.

I will admit that Simio was my first immersion into the world of using corporate modelling tools. It was a tough journey to get to the stage where I felt comfortable using Simio, but looking back... I wonder how I got by using the archaic tools I did. The learning curve to Simio was extremely steep (in my humble opinion that is), and I still don't believe I am anywhere near utilizing 100% of Simio's capabilities. That being said... Simio is a relatively new tool and is still under active development.

After launching Arena for the first time, the first thing that struck me was how bland/simple it was. Putting that to one side, I was impressed with how intuitive it was to use. This may be a side effect of using Simio, but barring my inability to find the Connect button for linking the objects together, I simply dragged objects into the process view and linked them up. The objects all had names that made sense (workstation... server... what were you guys thinking? >_>), and ignoring the fact that most of the symbols looked like they were drawn by pre-schoolers... the process of getting a simple model running was child's play. Within 5minutes I had my first working model. (I can tell you that it took a lot longer than that for my first Simio experience)

One of the features I would love to see the most in Simio... AVI export. It was right there, and it was easy. Come on Simio!

After placing multiples of an object, there was a table at the bottom of the screen with every other object of the same type, allowing you to quickly locate and edit properties of said objects... Simio... adding something like this would immeasurably improve productivity (mine atleast) and increase my levels of sanity after working with large models.

Another point to note was that Arena felt very responsive, and while this normally would not be an achievement for a piece of software... Arena did not crash or give cryptic errors. (Simio crashed multiple times during my first 30minute experience with it... and I didn't even know how to do anything more advanced with it at that stage).

The last point to make in this section of the post, is how human readable the reports were. My eyes were not assaulted with a million numbers. You could argue this is a bad thing or a good thing, but at the end of the day, some of these reports matched what I typically look for in Simio, and have to waste time trying to get. They were also laid out clearly and concisely.

I am sure Arena has a fairly similar learning curve to Simio once you get to the more advanced stuff, but I have got to say that Arena definitly has the edge of many years of polish and tweaking.

I am not here though to plug Arena. Let's get to the meat of this post now. The things I saw in my short time using Arena in comparison to Simio, that Simio did better. Even though I feel Simio has a lot more work to do on getting their product to the kind of a level Arena sits at (polish and usability) in terms of: aesthetics, power, time-savings (gained from re-usability of objects in Simio, instead of hard coded processes in Arena), feature base, and on-going development... Simio wins hands down.

The benefits of object based models in comparison to process based models are imeasureable, and while some of the more basic features you would expect (or take for granted) in a modelling tool are lacking or missing in Simio, a lot of thought and has gone into the development of this tool. You can really see how Simio is the next generation of tool.

I guess the point I am really trying to convey is, Simio rocks. It may be buggy as hell, it may not have every bell and whistle to satisfy my unreasonable demands, and it may not be as smooth or intuitive as Arena, but it is actively developed and a lot of love and care went into its development. I dare say that given time and a bigger/more active community, Simio will truly come into its own.

The Arena community may be larger, but it does not appear as if Arena itself is evolving to meet the ever changing demands of the market. I guess it won't be long until the remaining Arena modellers move on and embrace newer technologies like Simio.

Sorry for the long post.

TLDR: Keep up the good work guys!

Edited April 4, 2012 by Guest

[jzhou]

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..!

[jdoran]

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..!

Ah good to hear. A lot of my job revolves around the use of this tool, but I definitely do not envy you for using the tool, during what I can only assume would be its more "rough" stages of development, and having to support multiple users all trying to do weird and wonderful things with the tool... in ways that it probably wasn't intended to be used.

I can only see Simio getting better in the near future, and look forward to the new features we will see.

Although I was left a little confused with the release of the Enterprise version. Based off of the release notes, the only things added seem like new features I would expect to see in the Team version. If I got my hands on it, I want to take it out for a test drive.