Arena Newsletter and Blog

Two members of our Arena Consulting & Services team were delighted to have their session submission selected for the Society of Women Engineers WE20 Annual Conference. Their session was titled “When Experience and Excel Aren’t Enough, is Simulation the Solution?” This presentation was intended to introduce discrete-event simulation and when it is an appropriate analytical tool. If you would like to ask questions around this presentation, please send them to arena-info@ra.rockwell.com

Some users have reported issues using Crystal Reports since updating to Windows 10. In response, Arena has migrated our Crystal reports away from ODBC to ACE OLEDB provider and we released a patch with this update. Below, we've listed out the related patch notes for your review, and you can download the latest version by clicking here.

We have been receiving a number of questions about building Arena simulation models from healthcare organizations that are struggling to cope with the COVID-19 crisis. While we will continue to provide support as quickly and thoroughly as we can to individual questions, we wanted to write a post to help with general suggestions for users building models focused on predicting healthcare capacity and bottlenecks. 

While simulation tools have improved over time, most of these improvements have been in regards to simplifying technical hurdles, like importing data or making the user interface easier to understand. The complexity of how to break down a complicated, real-world process into concrete steps that can be modeled in a simulation language continues to be the most difficult part of using any package.

Worldwide, the average human is 5’6” (167cm) tall. This is a true fact – I know because I found it on the internet. However, is it a useful fact? Assume for a moment that you are a manufacturer of blue jeans. Would you take this average height value and then size all of your equipment so that it can only make jeans for individuals who are exactly this height? Now imagine your business was more narrowly focused in terms of your potential customer pool, e.g. men living in the United States. If you’re aiming for a smaller group, would it make any more sense to buy equipment that only makes one length of jeans? Or should you take the range of potential heights into account when designing your factory?

In this month’s case study, one of the chief goals of the simulation model was to test several potential operational modifications. When there are several changes to test, the questions arise:

Arena is innovating simulation of high speed systems.  We’re solving bigger problems, faster, and more accurately to help our customers remain competitive in their fast paced business.

In Discrete Event Simulation one issue we must resolve is the number of concurrent entities in the model. If that number gets “large” then model run speed can be impacted. In the typical systems that we model this usually does not become an issue either because we will not have a large concurrent number or because our computers are really fast.