Teaching Simulation using JaamSim

[Harry King]

JaamSim Users,

An increasing number of professors and lecturers are using JaamSim for the courses on discrete-event simulation. This thread is intended to be a place where these teachers can exchange information and materials with other teachers. Please indicate as much basic information about your course as you are comfortable about releasing, for example:

• your name
• university/college/school name and location
• course name
• type of student
• approximate number of students per year
• year you started using JaamSim
  

Although a number of you have already provided this information to me in emails or in older posts, it would be best it you re-posted it here so that everything is in one place and to ensure that there are no privacy concerns.

Anyone who is willing to release his/her course notes would be doing a great service to other teachers, and might generate some useful feedback and suggestions. We welcome any suggestions on features that would make JaamSim easier to teach and use, however, you should start a new thread for each set of suggestions so that they don't clutter this thread.

Harry

[jame...@uvg.edu.gt]

Hi Harry, here's the info for my courses. I am currently teaching in 2 universities, in one at the undergraduate level and in the other at the master's level.

your name: Antonio Medrano

university/college/school name and location: Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala

course name: Operations Research II / Technology for Quality (Lean Six Sigma methdology)

type of student: Third year engineering / Masters Degree in Industrial Management

approximate number of students per year: 50 / 30

year you started using JaamSim: 2015

[Mike H]

Mike Halls

Derby College, UK

Production and Operations Management

Foundation Degree Level 5 (Year 2 Undergraduates equivalent)

Approx 20 students

2016

Anyone who is willing to release his/her course notes would be doing a great service to other teachers, and might generate some useful feedback and suggestions. We welcome any suggestions on features that would make JaamSim easier to teach and use, however, you should start a new thread for each set of suggestions so that they don't clutter this thread.

I will do this soon after 13th June.

Mike 

[E.T.]

Many thanks for this initiative!

Enrique Teruel, associate professor at the University of Zaragoza (Spain)

I'm (relatively, a "newcomer") starting to prepare a course on Dynamic Systems Simulation (comprises DES and continuous/hybrid), to be taught from next February 2017.
It is currently a (popular: 40 students) optional undergraduate subject in the last year of a 4-year degree in electronics and automation engineering (therefore: automatic control focused, rather than operations research).

It has been taught the last (almost) 20 years (also to computer science students) using Arena, but I'd rather use, and recommend, opensource, for several (obvious) reasons, mainly that students learn best by doing, so they need full access to the tools.
For the continuous/hybrid systems simulation my plan is using OpenModelica (instead of MatLab/Simulink, and here the matter is not only opensource vs privative, but acausality and standard specifications).

I'd explore also the possibility of using OpenModelica (with some extension?) for DES simulation, although it looks less likely to be the case.

Likewise, I'd explore the possibility of using JaamSim for hybrid (or continuous) systems simulation, although it looks still less likely to be the case.

[José Airton Azevedo dos Santos]

Hi Harry, here's the info for my course. I am currently teaching basic simulation the undergraduate levell.  

your name:  José Airton A. dos Santos

university/college/school name and location: Universidade tecnológica Federal do Paraná

course name:  Operations Research / Basic Simulation (1 topic of the course - Use only the objects

: EntityGenerator, Server, Queue, Branch, Combine, SetGraphics,Pack,Unpack)

type of student:  Third year of industrial engineering

approximate number of students per year:  30 / 50

year you started using JaamSim:  2015

[jmol...@capilanou.ca]

Hi Harry, I guess it is time that I get myself into the forum.
your name: John Molendyk
university/college/school name and location: Capilano University, North Vancouver, Canada
course name: Operations Management
type of student: 3rd year undergraduate business students
approximate number of students per year: 70
year you started using JaamSim: In this role, recently. Originally about 2002

[E.T.]

Dear JaamSim users and developpers, We have just finished the class lessons with JaamSim as a DES simulation package, in our Electronics and Automation Engineering Degree, at University of Zaragoza. The students will develop a variety of cases (from the “Arena Contests”) in their assignments.

In my opinion, the experience has been very positive. A crucial point is the opensource nature of JaamSim, which provides easy availability for homework, among other advantages: the possibility to see the code, and the existence of a community. Besides this, the application is more than powerful and fast enough, with a very convenient graphic interface for modelling and animation, and a remarkably easy to use independent or common random numbers approach, based on the GlobalSubstreamSeed, which is ideal for analysis using replications, and for comparing alternatives.

During these months we have enjoyed a superb response from the JaamSim team, including the agile incorporation of new features, or bug-fixing, thanks a lot!

From the experience, there are a couple of issues that we believe could be improved:

• Expression edition: User-specific logic and definition of performance measures, typically within Assign/AttributeAssignmentList, Simulation/RunOutputList, etc, are often lengthy, and it is not convenient to edit them in a line-box. We recommended using a text editor, and then cut&paste, but a sound built-in expression editor would be welcome. We reckon this would be quite an undertake to develop, but it appears that it might be worthwhile.

• Modular design: We have commented on this a couple of times. Admittedly this is far from easy to deal with, but it is missed now when you face a model with some repetitions, or near repetitions. A suggestion is to (ab)use the concept of “regions”, to allow duplication of several entities at once, for latter edition/adjustment.

Our plan is to keep on using JaamSim during the coming years (we used Arena before), and we are willing to keep on contributing (at least) with further comments and beta-testings, and also with worked-out examples to share, similarly to the Examples of JaamSim Objects, given some guidelines from the team to prepare and document such examples.

Best regards!

[w.ber...@basleinstitute.ch]

Hi Harry

Here is the info for my courses, where I use JaamSim as a tool:

* My name: Prof. Willi Bernhard
* university/location: Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences / Brig (Switzerland)
* course name 1: Math Methods & Models for decision making
* course name 2: Complexity Management with Simulation
* type of student: Bachelor of Science
* approximate number of students using JaamSim per year: 40
* year started using JaamSim: 2016

Best regards
Willi

[Nelson Uhan]

Hi everyone,

My colleague David Phillips and I are trying out JaamSim in our undergraduate simulation course this semester. Some details:

• Institution: United States Naval Academy - Annapolis, MD, USA
• Name of course: Simulation Modeling
• Type of student: 4th-year undergraduate operations research majors
• Number of students: 40-60 students/year
• started using JaamSim in 2017

Best,

Nelson

[E.T.]

Dear JaamSim users, following Harry's request above, I share with you the slides (with notes) and models from our course (mostly in Spanish, for the moment) at the University of Zaragoza.

It is a GoogleDrive folder the link to which is published in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/Teruel2017SimulacionSistemasDinamicos.

It has been presented (also in Spanish) at "Jornadas de Automatica CEA 2017" and "CINAIC 2017".

The course contains two parts, one about DES, with JaamSim, and another for continuous systems, with (Open)Modelica.

I'm revising some examples, such as the FMSwithAGVs posted elsewhere, and I intend to keep on preparing more examples,

and improving whatever I find suitable. Your feedback is more than welcome.

Many thanks to the JaamSim team!

El sábado, 21 de mayo de 2016, 0:00:19 (UTC+2), Harry King escribió:

[Leo de Vin]

Leo De Vin from Karlstad University, Sweden.

We intend to use JaamSim in a number of courses, mainly Production Systems 1 for 3rd year Engineering students. We will mainly use it to teach the basics of production simulation, although we could see some students using it for Thesis work on BSc and MSc level. We will also use it linked to Lean Production education, for instance they play a game in our custom built Karlstad Lean Factory. That would be a good combination of hands-on experience and the possibility to study effects of improvement suggestions in JaamSim.

Whilst the documentation available for JaamSim is very good and there are many examples available here, I still felt the students might benefit from documentation for their very first steps. I made a video (admittedly not a very smooth one) and a step-by-step guide for students who never have used JaamSim before. Please feel free to use them, or to make a better video inspired on mine. NOTE: The video is too large to upload here so I'll get back to you about that leter.

[Leo de Vin]

Here's the link to the video (as mentioned, not the best of quality and not very smooth, but should do for a student who want to get started on their own):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SqBuI3FtOs4mfQckqhmR32WQUw47gmYw/view?usp=sharing

[Mike H]

Hi Leo

I created some notes/tutorials for JaamSim, if you are interested, please see the attached.

I use some of these with my students, I created them as I learned how to use JaamSim and its features so that I could teach simulation.

They are posted in the forum, somewhere around June 2016.

I like the video.

Regards

Mike H

[Jose Antonio Medrano Garcia]

Hello Harry and all, I am currently working on a set of class notes for one of my master's degree classes (Technology for Quality Improvement). The working title for the notes is Lean Six Sigma with Open Source Software and in them I use Jaamsim, among other programs, to implement LSS improvement projects based on the DMAIC methodology. The notes are still work in progress and written in spanish but if anyone wants to take a look at them, please feel free to make any comments/suggestions and I promise they will be considered. Just a disclaimer, they are not tutorials or "how-to" manuals for any of the software but more like a guide of the different things you can do for each of the DMAIC stages and tools using FOSS and other tools.

https://www.academia.edu/35348628/LEAN_SIX_SIGMA_CON_SOFTWARE_LIBRE 

[Leo de Vin]

Question: "Inactive" objects
When I guide my students step-by-step to more advanced models, at one stage I would like to present them with a model that contains seize and release objects. The idea is that they would have modeled a small production facility with conveyor transports and now three of these would be replaced by a shared truck.
In the step before this, students are encouraged to play around with availability etcetera, and check the effects on queues and throughput. So when they start to model shared resources (and some more stuff), then I would really like them to use the same base model.
To assist them and to reduce "look up" time in the manual, I would like to provide a model with seize and release objects already there - but without data or logic.
However, if I have unused "inactive" seize and release objects, I get error messages that I need to specify some parameters even although the objects are not used.

 Some good advice anybody? Obviously I would admit that this "problem" only occurs in education, in "real" simulations (a bit of a contradictio i terminis) nobody would drag in objects into the view window that they do not plan to use at that stage. 

[Harry King]

Leo,

The you can have inactive Seize and Release objects in a model by connect them to each other using the NextComponent keyword, and by providing inputs for any other keywords that are marked as "Required Input" in the Input Editor.

Another approach would be to use the new EntityProcessor object, which has the optional ability to seize and release resources. This object would allow you to start with three separate EntityProcessors for the dedicated transport case (no resources seized or released) and then add a common resource that is seized and released by each of the three EntityProcessors for the shared truck case.

Harry

[Leo de Vin]

Thanx Harry,
I'll try those. Or alternatively, rethink my modeling & simulation exercise. My reason for letting them build a more complex model stepwise (instead letting them build simpler models each focusing on a specific problem) is that the outcome would be a simulation model that resembles what they are going to do in a Lean Production game.
/Leo

[Jose Antonio Medrano Garcia]

Hello Harry et al, I´m sure most of you are aware of this edX MOOC on Modeling and Simulation for Engineering and Science from Georgia Tech but in case some of you haven´t seen it, I share the link with you.  The course uses Arena as its main tool but it all can be translated into JaamSim relatively easy.  In case you want to share it with your students or colleagues.

 

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:GTx+ISYE6644x+2T2017/course/

 

[mjos...@gmail.com]

Hi Harry,

Here's my info.

your name: Dr Michael O'Sullivan

university/college/school name and location: University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

course name: ENGSCI 355 Applied Modelling in Simulation and Optimisation
ENGSCI 700A/B Research Project

type of student: undergraduate

approximate number of students per year: 35 and 4

year you started using JaamSim: 2015

Some teaching case studies are available at the followign web pages:

https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/SimpleHealthClinic
https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/SHCScheduledAppointments
https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/ExtendedHealthClinic
https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/EHCWithRosters

[Akram Najjar]

Hello Mike

Your document explaining various simulations is very valuable. Are there .cfg files we can download?. 

And, is there a Part 1b or 2? Hopefully.

[Mike H]

Hi Akram

Please have a look at this post, the notes are there in one post and the models are there in another as a zip file.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jaamsim-users/GykOHbD7Sc0

As the models become more complicated, the more lengthy the explanations became, I never got around to writing up any other models due to work commitments

I wrote these in order to learn about JaamSim myself, so that I had something to check against mathematically and to give me confidence in what I was doing.

In the real world, they are not very useful, since real world situations are much more complicated.  However, I think they have their place to help people getting started with JaamSim and the different features that can be used and how to use them.

You must also remember that there have been many updates since I wrote these models, I do not think that any are affected by the updates, but there may be more elegant ways of implementing some of the models using the new features that have been introduced since.

For me the key to JaamSim is the use of formulae for creating various behaviours, understanding the format and syntax of the formulae and how to build them was a revelation.

Regards

Mike H.

[co...@wharton.upenn.edu]

Here is the information about my course where we used Jaamsim. Anyone interested in learning more can contact me at

co...@wharton.upenn.edu


• your name: Morris A. Cohen
• university/college/school name and location: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
• course name: Analytics for Service Operations
• type of student: Undergraduate (junior and senior)
• approximate number of students per year: 25
• year you started using JaamSim: 2018
This course is an Operations Management Elective which covers some of the basic analytical tools and models used to evaluate service operations processes. Course topics include:
• Design of a service strategy
• Capacity management for services
• Service quality management
• Service delivery processes
• Revenue management
• Lean for services
• After-sales service product support
• Servicization of products and product-service systems


The course introduces queuing models to analyze basic capacity and control decisions for services. Jaamsim is then used to consider more complex service delivery systems for which a simple analytical solution is not available. Jaamsim enables a “hands-on”, Active Learning approach for teaching this topic.

The exercise that the students worked on was a 2 stage, multi-server service delivery example. Working individually, students mastered the basics of setting up and running models in Jaamsim. Half of the course grade is based on a group project that requires the students to apply course concepts and tools to a real-world service delivery problem. Jaamsim was provided as a tool to support this stage of the course.

[mjos...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

Just in case it is useful here are 4 JaamSim tutorials that we use (in my class ENGSCI 355 and with researchers) to incrementally build a model of a Health clinic:

https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/SimpleHealthClinic

https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/SHCScheduledAppointments

https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/ExtendedHealthClinic

https://twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/bin/view/OpsRes/EHCWithRosters

Kind regards, Mike

[Jonathan Eckstein]

• Jonathan Eckstein
  
• Rutgers University / Rutgers Business School Newark and New Brunswick
  
• Business Decision Analytics under Uncertainty
  
• Undergraduate business students majoring in Business Analytics and Information Technology
  
• 100 - 200
  
• 2020
  

The course contains many other topics including decision analysis, critical fractile analysis, dynamic programming, spreadsheet-based Monte Carlo simulation, and some elementary queuing theory.  A short module at the end addresses discrete event simulation -- that's where we used JaamSim.

General impressions:  we used to use Arena.  JaamSim is much faster, has way more appealing graphics, and runs on Macs (that was the clincher during social isolation).  From a design perspective, I can also see that it has a more flexible and carefully thought out architecture, but that is not a prime consideration in my narrow pedagogical application.   For relatively simple queuing networks, I found models slightly more time consuming to set up in JaamSim than Arena, and some statistics require much more work to get at. 

It would be nice to have a way of warning unsophisticated students that they are generating entitites much faster than they are processing them, balooning their queues.  Quite a few students did this but seemed to assume that there was some issue with the software or their computers as the calculation bogged down (sad, I know).

To graphically convey the concept of discrete-event simulation, it might be nice to have an animation mode that is a slowed-down full speed, rather than being proportional to the real-time clock: basically, one could just insert a constant delay each time an event is processed (maybe this can be done already, but it wasn't obvious).

[Harry King]

JaamSim Users,

With the changes to Google Groups this topic is no longer pinned to the top of the forum posts. To remedy this, I have added a blog post (link) that lists the academic institutions that use JaamSim and provides a link to this topic in the forum.

I would appreciate any additions to this list. Please add a forum post under this topic if you would like to provide information about your course.

Harry

[Cristiano Silva]

Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil.

Production engineering: facilities planning and the supply chain, for through each step in the planning process, with precision.

Atenciosamente,

Cristiano Luís Turbino de França e Silva

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[david...@gmail.com]

University: Universidade Federal Rural do Semi-Árido.

Course: Production Engineering

Subject: Probabilistic modeling and production simulation

Country: Brazil.

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jaamsim-users/CAJ7TUjrqXWHzHqQV%2BpYYkDA5A7%3DS2a6K9xRQakfZ8zj5TwiO_A%40mail.gmail.com.

[WILSON TRIGUEIRO DE SOUSA JÚNIOR]

University: Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei.

Course: Production Engineering

Subject: Discrete Event Simulation.

Country: Brazil.

[Leo de Vin]

I previously published a short video that guides students through the first steps of building a model. It has since been subtitled for students with impaired hearing (subtitles can be toggled on/off). Here's the new link:

Link to KauPlay

Best, Leo

[Christof Defryn]

Hi all,

as I am using Jaamsim in some of my courses, hereby an overview as well as some study materials I created:

About me

• Name: Christof Defryn
• Function: Assistant Professor Operations Research
• University: Maastricht University (The Netherlands) and University of Antwerp (Belgium)
• Course name: "Operations Management" (here I have one introductory chapter on waiting lines and simulation) + "Simulatietechnieken (= discrete-event simulation)" (Here students work on a larger project using Jaamsim)
• Type of Student: Bsc Internation Business, Bsc Business Engineering, Bsc Business Analytics, Msc Business Engineering.
• Approx. #students per year: over all courses (+- 200 students)
• Year started using Jaamsim: 2019

Some course materials

• An introductory reader on waiting lines and simulation (see attachment).
  
• A video tutorial on basic single- and multi-server models in Jaamsim. Watch here.
  

Op zaterdag 21 mei 2016 om 00:00:19 UTC+2 schreef d.harr...@gmail.com:

JaamSim Users,

An increasing number of professors and lecturers are using JaamSim for the courses on discrete-event simulation. This thread is intended to be a place where these teachers can exchange information and materials with other teachers. Please indicate as much basic information about your course as you are comfortable about releasing, for example:

• your name
• university/college/school name and location
• course name
• type of student

• approximate number of students per year

• year you started using JaamSim
  

Although a number of you have already provided this information to me in emails or in older posts, it would be best it you re-posted it here so that everything is in one place and to ensure that there are no privacy concerns.

Anyone who is willing to release his/her course notes would be doing a great service to other teachers, and might generate some useful feedback and suggestions. We welcome any suggestions on features that would make JaamSim easier to teach and use, however, you should start a new thread for each set of suggestions so that they don't clutter this thread.

Harry

[Mario Velez]

Hi all!

Thank you Harry for this initiative. My info below:

• Mario C. Vélez-Gallego
• Universidad EAFIT / Medellín / Colombia
• Simulation
• Undergraduate / Industrial Engineering program
• around 50 students pero year
• Started using JaamSim in January 2022

[E.T.]

Hi all. We're going to use JaamSim in an Erasmus+ BIP course (starting spring 2025) on Discrete Event Simulation. The partners are Univ. Piemonte Orientale, Univ. Sorbonne-ParisNord, Univ. Iasi and Univ. Zaragoza.