FlexSim 2022: Experimenter Enhancements

Welcome to the new and improved Experimenter in FlexSim 2022.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new interface and the streamlined number of tabs. The first is the “Jobs” tab, and this is a new distinction when discussing simulation experiments in FlexSim. Each Job represents the parameters and scenarios that make up that experiment, whether it’s a normal simulation experiment or an optimization experiment using the OptQuest add-on. The Job has its own configuration, parameters, scenarios, and other settings. And yes—this means you can have multiple experiment Jobs in a single model.

As you change a Job, the “Run” tab will update to show the scenarios and replications that make up the Job. There is now a unique identifier for every scenario and replication. If you create a scenario with identical parameters as another scenario, it won’t be added to the Job because there is already a unique scenario with those specific parameters.

Unique identifiers have also enabled several convenient new features for your experiments. First, you no longer need to re-run every replication each time you change the experiment. If you add more scenarios and replications, they will be added as “proposed” replications alongside the already completed ones—to be completed with the next batch. You can even delete the data from a single replication and re-run just that replication. And speaking of batches, FlexSim now supports running multiple Jobs with a single click. You can select as many Jobs as you’d like and have them run sequentially as a batch.

Another new feature in the Run tab is the Test Tube button found in each unique replication. Click this button and you can apply this specific scenario and replication to the model.

Starting with FlexSim 2022, all your experiment results data is saved in a SQLite database file, which by default has the same name as the model file and is saved in the same directory. This offers a big advantage over previous version of FlexSim—it doesn’t use RAM to store your results, so you can run experiments with many scenarios and many replications without eating up system resources; and all that data is stored in a separate database file on your hard drive, which means the model file will be smaller. If you check “Save state after each replication” in the “Advanced” tab, all the saved states can be found in the Performance Measure Results, and you can easily extract the state file you want—or all of them—from the database file.

Thank you for watching, and we hope you enjoy FlexSim 2022.