Flexsim vs. SIMIO

[Shankar Narayan]

Has anyone used both Flexsim & SIMIO and can they shed some light on pros & cons of each? My first impression is that SIMIO offers similar features as Flexsim but the IDE is much more 'standardized' for a Microsoft VS look & feel and this they claim improves modeling efficiency. Just want to know what the real users thinks of both.

Appreciate your time sincerely.

[Roger Hullinger]

We recently had an independent consultant (who previously worked for ProModel for several years) attend a Flexsim training class. Interestingly, he also attended a Simio course a few weeks later. Given his familiarity with simulation and his recent experience with both Flexsim and Simio, I will ask him to respond to your post and question.

[Jon Fournier]

I've had some exposure to both FlexSim and Simio.

There are definitely pros and cons to each, Simio's biggest ones (in my opinion) being that it's so new and not really complete yet. It's functional, but not as refined as it should be. I'm also a little dumbfounded at how you're supposed to be able to put custom behaviors in to a model. I know it's possible, but it's just completely different than the way I think through a problem. Also, (at least as of last December) Simio had issues displaying in 3D, mainly that you couldn't really move around in true 3D; you are restricted to translating in a 2D plane above the 3D, and you can rotate down to some extent, so that was a bit annoying.

Otherwise, it's a fairly similar paradigm for modeling, at least as far as laying out machines and elements in 3D and having parts move around, and having fixed versus mobile resources/elements, etc...

One really nice thing about Simio is that they've directly integrated the Google SketchUp 3DWarehouse into the product, as well as support for SketchUp files. You can do a search for 3D geometry you want right within Simio, and if you find it, click a button and it's imported. If you have geometry in SketchUp you just import the Skp file (I'm a big fan of SketchUp so it's probably just a big deal to me)

Another cool aspect of Simio is their experimenter, which will fully utilize multicore systems, running one replication or scenario on each core . Each replication only runs on one core, so it's not truly parallel, it just makes running an experiment a bit faster. One way they accomplish this is by restricting how you can access tabular data. You're not able to just interact with external files on the fly, you have to read them into some kind of table, and access that in your simulation, which is a good practice anyway. So they end up making copies of each table in memory for each replication. Pretty cool to watch, at least.

I'm sorry I don't have much more to say for comparing the two, as I haven't delved deeply into either FlexSim or Simio, but they're both good packages that have their place. Also, Simio's growing and evolving so fast that it's worth keeping an eye on what it can and cannot do.

Hope that helps,

Jon

[Shankar Narayan]

Jon

Thanks much for the initial attempt at the comparisions of the two. Much useful.

[Bill Nordgren]

One really nice thing about Simio is that they've directly integrated the Google SketchUp 3DWarehouse into the product, as well as support for SketchUp files. You can do a search for 3D geometry you want right within Simio, and if you find it, click a button and it's imported. If you have geometry in SketchUp you just import the Skp file (I'm a big fan of SketchUp so it's probably just a big deal to me)


Jon


Jon,

Version 5 of Flexsim also uses the SKP file format. You can use any Google sketchup file directly. We should probably make a bigger deal about that. See this video:

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[Bill Nordgren]

Simio claims that they are the first ones to have an easy to use 3D simulation software. In truth Flexsim has been easy to use for years. Flexsim is generation3 object oriented software. Simio is similar to the Taylor ED generation 2 object oriented software. Generation 1 was the EMPlant-Simple ++ stuff that was developed in the yearly 90's. If you compare a Flexsim object to a Simio object there is a night and day difference. Flexsim objects are much more robust, flexible, and capable. Animation wise there is no comparison. Flexsim uses many more standard formats. With the Flexsim animator included with version 5 of Flexsim, Simio animation just does not compare. Flexsim will use the cores in the next release to run experiments.

The bottom line is that Simio is a great Arena upgrade. It is built on the same principle with a new interface and some added capability. The visual coding constructs they have are limited and will get better in time. If you are looking at real technology and not hype, Flexsim is at least 10 years ahead in technology. I have built a model in Simio and find it cumbersome. Flexsim is much easier. Try modeling a conveyor with photo eyes, or putting something on the 5th level of a rack in Simio. It can not be done without simplifying or with the correct visualization. It does it about the same as Arena does it.

Simio also has a habit of copying Flexsim. They even had the same video on their homepage for a while. Hopefully we will see something original from them. Competition is good.

[Shankar Narayan]

I see that I have opened a hornest's nest here - being a Flexsim convert ourselves for the past few years we still find shiny new toys interestinng :D

[Bill Nordgren]

I would like someone who is not part of the Flexsim company or part of Simio to evaluate Simio and post their thoughts.

[zhouzheng]

'cus this is the forum owned by flexsim.so it is hard to be Neutral point of view.
In a techinal perspective , people even don't know what is your mention of TaylorII technology.
I am learning simio for a few months,and I only know ,simio has a agile development mode, which is quite good.

[Jon Fournier]

I would like someone who is not part of the Flexsim company or part of Simio to evaluate Simio and post their thoughts.

I'm not employed by FlexSim or Simio, or any simulation vendor; my job involves exercising simulation tools for small and medium sized manufacturing companies, and largely it's evolved to building tools for building simulation models faster.

We have licenses of QUEST, FlexSim, Extend, ProModel Process Simulator, and Arena Basic. Of all the tools I've used, I like QUEST the most for manufacturing models because they're much more tailored to manufacturing than the other software we have. QUEST isn't flexible enough to handle anything other than manufacturing, at least not elegantly or without a lot of unnecessary mental overhead.

FlexSim is by far the most flexible in terms of breadth and depth of possible areas they can simulate. I like that they're able to provide simulation software with different levels of abstraction to provide vertical solutions (i.e. healthcare, ship building), which trades flexibility for ease of use. Being able to translate a general purpose tool of infinite possibility (and infinite complexity) to something of very specific capability and easy to understand complexity is enormously important, in my opinion, in terms of getting simulation outside the realm of the dedicated simulation expert. Not to mention it's easy to get great looking 3D graphics in place (3ds, vrml, and now SketchUp import with textures).

Process Simulator and even ProModel proper are good tools, especially for manufacturing. Very nice 1 to many kind of mapping between routings and machines, which takes some doing in FlexSim (and Simio especially). ProModel's mission seems to be moving toward vertically integrated solutions as well, so good for them. They've probably got the best API I've seen for a simulation tool, at least for someone like me, who likes using COM API's in VBA for Excel and Visio. And I don't think I'm an atypical user.

Arena's by far the oldest-looking tool I've used, though they've obviously got the education market for now because they got there first (as far as I can tell). The only positive thing I can say about Arena is it has VBA embedded which makes it easy for me to hook into, but their API leaves much to be desired.

I have to admit I really like Extend, as it's a pretty functional tool for a great value. Some of its concepts are a little confusing, but I'm sure with some training and examples it's possible to pick it up and do quite a lot with it.

To me, Simio is a nice experiment in how to create a modern simulation interface, but I think they may have missed the mark. Maybe in future they'll be better at creating vertically integrated solutions, but before they can even attempt that, I'm sure they'll need to get their general purpose tool working right, and that's going to take some time. Time that FlexSim has already spent, and used to get miles ahead of Simio.

I hope I didn't make it seem I prefer Simio in my previous post, I was just listing the things they've done well. I don't know either tool as well as I would like. But the main point I guess I want to make is, my company has a license of FlexSim and we don't have one of Simio. Take that as you will.

[Shankar Narayan]

Thanks for taking the time to post an objective digest of each sim tool out there. We are in similar business of using multiple sim tools for various clients and have used most of the tools you have mentioned. I tend to agree with your assessemnt on most tools listed.