What is Visio Process Simulator?

Can anybody pl开发者_JAVA百科ease tell me what Visio Process Simulator is? How can I use it with Rockwell Arena simulation software?

First off, I just want to disclose that I am the developer of a tool that interfaces with Process Simulator and Arena, among other simulation tools, which my company plans to sell.

That being said, Process Simulator is a product from the ProModel company, and is basically a Visio-based front-end to the ProModel simulation engine. It allows you to lay out a chain of processes in Visio, and apply cycle times, resources, and several other simulation attributes. It then runs a simulation within Visio and produces an output statistics report.

To answer your question, you can interface a Process Simulator map (PSM) with the Arena simulation software, though it will take a good amount of skill programming for Visio, as well as Arena.

Basically, the solution entails that you compile the PSM from Visio into some in-memory representation. This representation should list all the resources in the PSM, as well as all the processes and all their attributes. It's fairly easy to retrieve these attributes, as Process Simulator stores them in a shape's ShapeSheet.

Now, with the in-memory representation of the model elements, you'd have to transfer them to Arena, but using Arena's COM API. Basically, you would create module objects in Arena (process and resource modules) corresponding with the PSM elements, and mapping the PSM attributes to the appropriate Arena attributes.

As I mentioned above, I have created a software product that does this, but utilizes the Core Manufacturing Simulation Data standard. This means, I extract the PSM data to an intermediary XML format created for storing simulation data, and I have another translator that builds an Arena model from the CMSD data. You can find out more here if you're interested, or you can build your own (which really isn't too hard to do).