…in which I post yet again on a topic about which I know relatively little… which arguably is not a recipe for a long and happy professional life It seems like every self-respecting simulation package has at least a modicum of animation capability – and many are, in fact, designed around pretty impressive animators. I… (read more)
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt. Often, but probably incorrectly, attributed to Mark Twain The idea of writing about random number generation (I mean, pseudo-random number generation, but that term involves way too much typing) makes me extremely nervous. When it comes to… (read more)
There are simulation tools that require you to define your model entirely in the form of a program, or source code – whether via an existing general purpose programming language or a special purpose simulation language. Other tools require you to define models totally through data: graphical, tabular, or some combination of the two. This… (read more)
I started my career in simulation building process-based models. That is, of course, a classic approach to simulation modeling, and it generally worked pretty well for the manufacturing applications that I was involved with. Fabrication and assembly work flows to often map very nicely to processes in a simulation model. Except when they don’t.
As I mentioned in my introductory post, I started down this road as a software engineer turned simulation practitioner, who thought he might be able to build a better – or at least different – mousetrap. Which naturally leads to the question: what am I trying to do differently? You might be tempted to translate… (read more)
