2020 Update 2 Features

Let’s go over some of the improvements and new features you’ll find in FlexSim 2020 Update 2.

We’ve made a significant update to properties windows in FlexSim, and we think this change will add consistency and convenience to your modeling experience. The “Quick Properties” that has lived in the right pane of FlexSim has been re-named “Properties” – and it’s not just a name change. All available properties for each object or activity are now available in this Properties pane. This is where the consistency part comes in; as recently as the last version of FlexSim, a Processor, and AGV path, and a Delay activity all had their properties in different windows that you accessed differently. Now their properties are edited in the same way as any other object or activity in FlexSim, and their properties windows have the same look and feel.

But what happens when you double-click on a 3D object now? This pop-up window has the same content as the Properties pane, so it really *is* a kind of quick properties window. This gives you access to the same properties in a convenient location, without having to scroll your mouse all the way to the right of the screen to edit. The pop-up quick properties and the Properties pane both have their own memory for which panels are expanded and collapsed, so you can keep everything expanded on the Properties pane but only a few important things expanded in the pop-up.

Along with this Properties update, we’ve added a new tool called Property Tables. These allow you to view properties across multiple objects, and we believe it’s a better interface for comparing and updating object properties. You can create a new Property Table right from the object’s Properties, or you can add an object to an existing Property Table.

And quickly before we move on from the interface, FlexSim now has a dark theme if you’d prefer a low-light UI while you build and run models. You can find it in the “Environment” tab of Global Preferences, under “Interface Theme.”

As for modeling, the biggest addition in FlexSim 2020 Update 2 is our Agent Systems tool, which will help you add agent-based systems and behaviors to your models. This new tool is covered in a separate video, and I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in this type of modeling.

We’ve added a handful of new activities in Process Flow. The Kinematics activities allow you to easily create and apply kinematics to 3D objects. The other two new activities will be useful in modeling warehousing systems. Find Item can query your model’s Storage System to find items stored in warehousing objects, such as racks or floor storage. Find Slot works similarly to Find Item, except it queries the Storage System to find slots in your warehousing objects.

All the Source activities were updated so you can turn them off by unchecking the “Enabled” checkbox in their Properties. The activity will get a “no sign” so you can clearly see that it’s not enabled. And finally, we’ve expanded our emulation support to include Allen-Bradley connections.

Thank you for watching, and we hope you enjoy FlexSim 2020 Update 2.