Friday Tips, The SIMUL8 Brain

Friday’s Tip – Analyzing your Scenarios

Sander  /   Dec 24, 2010

Most of the value of your simulation building comes from analyzing different “what if” scenarios. To make things easier, have a few key results to use as a way to compare the success of one run vs another. This is why SIMUL8 takes the strategy of making you to add results to the KPI summary rather than giving you every result imaginable by default as some software does. We believe getting you to choose focuses your mind on what you really need to look at to answer the question you’ve built your simulation to answer.

Did you know that as well as being able to add SIMUL8 object results you can add variables and spreadsheet cells to the results summary? Why would you want to? When you run a trial then you’ll get confidence interval results for them too, you should really always use trials to do a comparison, but that’s another blog post!

Back to adding variables and spreadsheets, here is how:

  1. Variables: Open up the information store and scroll down to the desired variable. Right clicking on that variable will allow you to ‘Add to KPIs’. Simply click on that option to add a variable to the results manager.
  2. Spread sheet cells: Click on the ‘All Visual Logic’ button and create a new section of VL. To add a spread sheet entry to the results manager go to command/simulation/information store/results/sheet location to results summary. The parameters to enter are the spread sheet cell and a sensible name to be added to the results manager. Please make sure you add the quotation marks around that sensible name (” “). The final step is to leave this section of VL and go to the VL overview again. Now right click that section you have just created and click on Execute now. This will add the results to the results manager.

About the author

Sander

Sander Vermeulen

Sander has been part of the simulation community for 16 years. During his time at SIMUL8 Corporation he has managed large simulation projects for Fortune 50 companies across a variety of industries including manufacturing, defense, call center and services.