How does Flexsim compare with ExtendSim?

[Kenny Macleod]

Does anyone have experience with both ExtendSim and Flexsim?

During a Flexsim presentation, someone asked how the two compare. Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks, Kenny

[LINWEIXU]

I have, l used extendsim more than two years ,i think Discrete system simulation flexsim is more power and flexible than extendsim,but extendsim is more easy to learn.

[Kenny Macleod]

Thanks Linweixu,

Good to know this but I need a bit more information; for example comparative functionality, pros/cons of each, etc..

Is there anything you can add?

Kenny

[LINWEIXU]

if you tell me what do want to do by Simulation,perhaps i can tell you more.
Extendsim control logic is more difficult,You can only control logic by changing the port parameters set, , if not the port, you can't control.
flexsim,the flexsim tree is a advantages. by tree you can control logic and
variables everywhere,the flexsim trriger is very useful,Flexsim 3d more powerful,Visual effect is better,is very useful for debugging model.and flexsim can control message (by sengmessage or senddelayedmessage)but extendsim. in extendsim there are also have messages ,But it is obsure,Flexsim have very strong expansibility but extendsim Unless you can develop ,there are a lot advantages in flexsim,so I started to learn flexsim.

[Kenny Macleod]

Thank you, I appreciate your assistance. I'll discuss this with the ExtendSim user and ask if there's anything of particular interest.

Kenny

[zhouzheng]

linwei
can you give a specific example (maybe models) to justify your comment ??
as i think , Extendsim's 3D is not good,but the logic is flexsible. and easy to create your own object, but this needs study the developer reference.

[LINWEIXU]

if you use extendsim,you can not dynamicly get the number of item in unbatch block(especialy,every out port item num),you can not because there is not port for this ,i have a lot of examples.can you use developer reference???? we just use it ,few person can develop it.if we can develop it,we also can develop own soft.

[Focus Kang]

Linwei，
You are not yourself ！ What happened to you ?
Is ExtendSim not being quite as good as what you thought before?
I think you should compare both advantage and disadvantage aspects of ExtendSim and Flexsim. Please don't only particularize disadvantages of ExtendSim. Thank you !

[LINWEIXU]

kang ,extendsim is more easy to learn,This is the advantages,

[Henry Bell]

Hi,

We have both products. They are products that are to a certain degree complementary.

We use FlexSim for visualization on complex, closely coupled systems where part location and orientation is critical. It's built in Graphing is better. On the other hand, in a dynamic facility design and equipment layout environment, it takes an enormous amount of effort to convert equipment drawings from CAD systems like ProEngineer into a compact fast format (VRML). If you have weekly updates to equipment drawings rendering those to VRML for multiple Level of detail can take alot of time. Modeling for external customers with no simulation experience can be more persuasive, unless of course they fixate on visual details which do not affect system performance. For example you select a forklift from a standard library of images, but the real system uses one with a different fork configuration. The 3D engine and animation are obviously more mature in Flexsim, but ExtendSim's use of the Torque game engine seems to provide room for future growth. Moving 3D Graphics to ExtendSim requires non-bundled software.

ExtendSim is used for modeling systems with lots of items, where some items you want to see moving in the animation and others need not be animated. ExtendSim's integrated relational database is also a very fast (much faster than ODBC) way to create, access, and write data during a model run. Many of our ExtendSim models have hundreds of database tables and thousands of items so having the database is a key feature. If you build models for statistical studies, 3D visualization really doesn't provide any significant benefit, because if your running 40 replications of a model that takes 30 minutes to run you wouldn't really watch the runs execute. The open block code make customizing functions or writing database enabled blocks simple. In our experience, model development seems to go faster on ExtendSim. Once we have the equipment quantity and buffer sizing we can fine tune it in a Flexsim model.

Hope this helps,

Henry B.