AnyLogic North America

Java, it's actually good for you. Free download.

This week I read a wonderful article on the largest to-date study ever conducted on the health risks and benefits of coffee drinking.  To my great relief the study strongly showed that even modest daily amounts of coffee over time dramatically reduces your risks of several diseases such as diabetes.  Now, all good modelers know not to confuse correlation and causality and its possible that some other trait common to coffee drinkers is the real benefit.  But I haven't had good health news in a while, so let me have this one, ok?

We at AnyLogic have our own love/hate relationship with Java.  (Notice the clever segue? :-)  Many of our users rely on their Java skills to expand models and features in ways not covered by the drag/drop palettes while others bemoan their lack of Java and wonder what they might be missing.  In the past we have recommended large technical books or websites.  But the good folks in St Pete have written the definitive lurker's guide to java for the Anylogic user -- 50 pdf pages laser-targeted to your development needs!

Get it here: Java for AnyLogic    and enjoy

One of our favorite customers is promoting their new book

The Manufacturing Game is a first class outfit.  And not just because they use AnyLogic (though it helps).  Their new book is about using socio-technnical networks to create a Level 5 Leadership Process.  What I like about it is the novelized approach to describing a business scenario and improvement process.  Reminds me of Golratt's (RIP) The Goal. 

In this second installment of the Heroic Change series James Emery has been promoted to Reliability Champion after his success in improving the Modern Products Manufacturing Atlanta site.  James faces a host of change management, turf, and organizational challenges that sound all too familiar to anyone doing process improvement.  And his successful Atlanta work starts regressing while he focuses on his new assignment.  Holy Process Improvement Batman, whatever can he do?

Join James on his Hero’s Journey towards building a Level 5 leadership process for organizational change!

Give us a call... speak with somebody nice for a change!

Calling the AnyLogic North America office at 908-735-9134 or 480-ANYLOGIC and you might get confused... Russian accent?  Did I mistakenly dial St Petersburg?  Nope.  You are speaking with the charming Alena.  We managed to pry her loose from the over-staffed HQ for a temp "field assignment" here in the USA.

Manning the phones, scrubbing the customer accounts, doing various and sundry to set us straight.  A dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.  The glory of it is she is still virtually connected to all the St Pete systems so we can get past customer info faster than ever before.  And, like the title says, she's great on the phone.  

So hurry and call now with any questions before you have to deal with me again!  Besides, you're much safer being on the phone with her than you are being on the road with her.  A word to the wise...

The 6 guys behind AnyLogic 6

Meet the XJ Technologies development team!  Normally we don't let them out much (that's why they're squinting in this unaccustomed daylight scene).  We like to keep them in their chairs.  Working long quiet hours.  Not bothering anybody much.  Every once in a while we give 'em a free t-shirt.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

George is the happy fellow in the prison shirt on the right.  As Exalted Cheif Developer his main job is to take credit and distribute blame.  You know, like management everywhere.  His favorite desk toy is a calendar printed on a sheet of rubber so he can keep pulling planned release dates further back.

The extremely uncomfortable looking fellow on the left is Nickolai.  He loves geeky electronics and risky sports.  Posing for photos... not so much.  Considered the most valuable person in XJ.  And we keep saying things like that to him so we don't have to pay him more.

Next is Sergey who is so secretive about his private life I can do nothing but make things up to fill space.  Let's see... ex-Spetnatz commando, has a pet Teddy Bear named "Chuckles", once beat a ninja and took his pants and has promised never to take them off.

Third from left is Andrey.  You know, the sporty type.  Does Yoga and football a lot to compensate for all the other geeks who never stop coding.  Personally responsible for 12% of the IM traffic in and out of St Petersburg.

Ilja (the one belligerently crossing his arms... thought the photographer had voted for Putin).  He loves alternative European movies and is an expert in them.  Which is easy since only 5 or 6 people ever see the kinds of movies he likes.  He drums his legs while working.  We're trying to develop a power take-off system based on this perpetual motion to drive some fans in the office.

Ivan, dozing on the right, is conducting an long-term experiment on the effects of only eating nuts and chocolate.  The results are mixed.  He writes code well but forgets how to speak for long periods of time.  His colleagues are amused by his origami --- little do they know he is secretly folding nasty poems about them in German.

So there they are.  The crack developers who are hard at work bringing you AnyLogic 7 sometime this summer.  When's that release date, George?

PRESS RELEASE: ANYLOGIC SCORES 98% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION by AnyLogic North America. Powered by WireTiger Press Release Services.

PRESS RELEASE: ANYLOGIC SCORES 98% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION by AnyLogic North America. Powered by WireTiger Press Release Services..

Now you can say "I have an app for that"

AnyLogic developers don't need to envy iOS developers since they can now generate apps - unlimited runtime licenses - as easy as: file/save as.  That's right, you can create a fully independent, self-running application on any OS that requires NO activation or registration on the part of your customers or co-workers.  They don't need AnyLogic... just the ability to double-click!  These apps include all the controls you designed for experiments as well as the ability to read/write data from external sources. 

This is just one of the many features such as Team Licensing, 3D Applets, and others included in the new AnyLogic 6.7 which is, of course, completely FREE to all our registered users.

 

 

Customer Spotlight: Electric Vehicles Simulation

We are allways excited to see customers doing leading-edge work with our software!

Electric vehicles will change the transportation and energy distribution landscape. GE Global Research is using advanced agent-based simulation (AnyLogic, of course!), expert reasoning and operations research techniques to understand this new world. Applications include granular models of EV adoption and the utilization and placement of charging infrastructure.

This exciting event will be Nov 17.  Register here: http://bit.ly/rdu7h9  Event number: 823 863 397
Event password: imagine

You can look backwards to know what happened, or you can simulate forwards to determine what will happen.  I can hardly wait to see GE's predictions!

Have an interesting customer story to tell?  Let us know about it!

Interactive tools deserve interactive videos

 

This is one of our standard videos off YouTube.  You can watch it, of course, but now you can also interact with it.  Check out the buttons on the upper right hand corner of the frame.  You can get more details of model, review associated pictures (right now it's a boring tractor, but it could be a headshot of the modeler, or chart of final output results...), and -- this is the fun part -- associated links.  You can switch from the video to running the model yourself.  Seen enough?  You can download AnyLogic directly and get started.  Or follow links to training or more information.  (Warning: If you follow the link from the blog to the blog you're liable to get stuck in an infinite loop and I won't be responsible ;-)

Yes...yes...I know.  Voiceover is coming too...

From Concept to Feature in record time.

As you may know we recently released version 6.6 (allright, in case you don't know, look down about 6 column inches to the previous post!)  but what you may not know is that most of the key features in this release were really our customers' ideas.  

1. For years the System Dynamics community has been pointing out that some of our digramming was not exactly the same as what was being termed "classical system dynamics" -- aka "Jay didn't draw it that way".
2. Just a few months ago a customer was working on a traffic modeling problem and it was so intriguing we had to take notice.

So in the latter case we developed the Road Traffic Library and it is such a natural companion to our rail and pedestrian libraries that we knew we had the makings of a complete transportation, logistics, and supply chain smart object modeling suite.  (As to the SD look-and-feel we hired ninjas to break into Dr Forrester's old boxes of notes in his attic so we could get all the arrows and stocks looking just right.)

But the point is: AnyLogic is under constant development and we are adding features and capabilities at a dizzying rate.  If there is something you'd like to see in the application just tell us directly or use the tool's built-in feedback mechanism.

 

One of the things that makes our simulation modeling software different from some of our competitors such as Arena, Simio, or Flexsim  is that we're a little more agile, a little quicker to react, and under constant development.  Sure, we were not the first ones to have 3D simulation software but then our modeling is not limited to the physical world and material flow like these others. With its rich agent-based and system dynamics components AnyLogic is as likely to work in more abstract terms. Our models can include continuous variables, such as cash flow, or even esoteric ones such as workforce morale; more than the ubiquitous "boxes on conveyors" that are so common in the discrete event modeling world.  In the world of simulation tools and simulation modeling AnyLogic really stands out as far as flexible simulation software goes.one of the reasons is because we listened to the people who actually do the modeling. Every new simulation release is heavily influenced by our customers feedback and from the insights we gain in our get support process.

Our new version 6.6, is a good example of this philosophy. We think the key to success is balancing the quality and depth of your simulation models with the speed and ease of your simulation modeling. As you watch the video you'll note that ever since we took the brave plunge to completely rewrite our product in Java/Eclipse we've been steadily improving our simulation software with two or three major releases every year. And having seen the roadmap I can tell you that trend will continue with AnyLogic 7 expected at the end of the year. So model often, model hard, and model in clever new ways, but don't forget to give us your feedback and ideas. You'd be surprised how quickly we can take them from a customer's casual remark to an integral part of the application.

AnyLogic Releases Version 6.6 -- Something for Everybody

As I write this AnyLogic 6.6 is being put on the www.xjtek.com download page.  As usual our tireless developers have added a host of new features -- many of them suggested by our customers through the feedback surveys (so, thanks).  But this release has something for everybody:

• System Dyanmics modelers. We have revamped the user interface to be more in line with the classical appoach.  Now you can just draw dependencies and create your qualitative causal diagram and then come back to it and add formulas later.  (There are also several diagramming and graphical improvements).
• Transportation modelers.  We had the Pedestrian library.  We recently added the Rail library.  Now comes the new Road Traffic library where you can easily create complex and detailed vehicle flow simulations with drag/drop ease.  Naturally you can combine all these libraries into a detailed transportation model.  Can anyone say "urban planning", or "evacuation"; many applications!  And because AnyLogic is the ONLY tool that allows you to combine multiple simulation paradigms you can construct huge models by using discrete event or system dynamics components to handle parts of the system and lower your computational demand.
• Agent developers and learners.  Our new Modeling Wizard makes creating agent populations a matter of grabbing the Agent Population object and dropping it onto the design environment.  Don't let all this power go to your head.
• People who like to share ;-)  Everything is social networks now so, in addition to our web Forum and LinkedIn groups we have launched Runthemodel.com a new site where you can upload and share your models with a single command.  Want to post your latest work for your team's review?  Want to build a killer portfolio to impress your clients?  Looking for a new job in modeling?  Or do you just want to show off?  Runthemodel.com is an easy and elegant solution.  We plan to run contests and evolve this platform in many ways.  It's still in Private Beta but you can check it out now: Runthemodel.com 
• Techies.  Well, most of our readers are techies, technically, so they'll all be happy to hear about  these great features: automatic Units checking and reporting, integration with ExpertFit, new example models and how-to models, more collection types... there's a list you see.  Why not download the New Features list and go through them in detail?
• People who speak other languages!  That's right, AnyLogic is now available in German and Chinese (in addition to Italian, Russian, and English).   What a small world we have.
• Academics.  It wouldn't be right to leave them out, would it?  USB dongle activation is a new feature for University Researcher and Educational licenses.  And we have added the Rail library to the Educational version to encourage students to build rail models and help us explore the possibilities.  Consider it a graduation present.

 

The Windows version is available for download on the website - the wizard will lead you through a one-step uninstall of previous version and replacement.  "Update available" notices will be pushed to AnyLogic users upon application launch starting in a few days. Mac and Linux versions will follow soon.  If you're a lapsed customer just give us a call and we'll extend some maintenance amnesty so you won't have to miss out on all the above.  If you're a simulation professional but haven't checked out AnyLogic (as if!) then follow these links or contact our US office for a no-pressure demo or webinar. 

Don't forget to leave comments and tell us what you think.  Mentioning the blog entry may not get you a discount, but it warms our hearts, and we really do take your feedback seriously.