Blog

This October, we participated in several events in Japan and China, including the ITpro Expo in Tokyo, and the China International Logistics and Transportation Fair (CILF) in Shenzhen, two of the biggest industry events in the countries. The book AnyLogic in Three Days, which is based on the 3 day AnyLogic training, will soon be published in Japanese. The book is co-authored by Ilya Grigoryev, Head of Training Services at the AnyLogic Company, and Nobuaki Minato, Project Associate Professor at Graduate School of SDM, Keio University.

Last week, we were excited to conduct the first European combined AnyLogic training. This was also our biggest European training session, with 23 participants, mostly coming from research and educational institutions. The trainees represented Germany, France, UK, Italy, Denmark, and other countries.

Over the past few months the AnyLogic North America team have been busy attending many customer events and conferences and spreading the good word about AnyLogic. AnyLogic North America attended the Annual INFORMS conference in Minneapolis, MN at the beginning of October. We maintained a high visibility level through two workshops (one workalong, and one demonstration) and our state-of-the-art booth. Indeed, our booth received very complimentary remarks from several of the other vendors for its elegance and messaging.

To continue on the topic of pedestrian modeling: recently, I heard the news that the new terminal being built in the St. Petersburg airport will be tested using a free labor force, or in other words, volunteers. Actually, the volunteers will test the terminal’s operations and on-ground facilities by acting like passengers. It was interesting to find that the London Heathrow and Dubai airports are using this practice right now too. Here in St. Pete, they gathered more than 5,000 volunteers, to come to the terminal and walk around, jostle to check-in desks, race up the down-moving escalators, get bored in queues to passport controls, etc. I suspect that the volunteers will be watched by engineers, who will be counting the number of injuries per minute. That’s how airport authorities are going to see if everything is OK with the terminal.

How can an overpopulated city fight traffic congestion? Examples from many current metropolitan areas show that, apart from subways and buses, city railways can greatly improve traffic situations. Probably the most famous city rail system is the S-Bahn in Germany. In North America, one of the more well-known examples is the BeltLine in Atlanta, Georgia.

This September the simulation society in UK enjoyed two meaningful events – OR55 Annual Conference and 8th EUROSIM Congress. The first one is more attended by practitioners and the second one is a more academic event. At both conferences people were very excited about AnyLogic 7, although there were concerns by the move towards a wizard based system and how it might damage the 'power' of AnyLogic. We are keen to assure you that it is a baseless fear! Wizards are aimed to facilitate the learning curve for those who are new to the software. If you do not need Wizard’s assistance, you can easily skip this option and continue creating models via regular interface.

AnyLogic North America had another successful training. In San Jose, over a dozen students representing commercial interests from marketing and epidemiology to semiconductor manufacturing and behavioral modeling, learned how to apply AnyLogic’s unique multimethod modeling capability to their business problems. Users of all three modeling methods – System Dynamics, Discrete Event, and Agent Based modeling – were represented. Many interesting discussions occurred regarding when to use which method, and the networking among the students yielded excellent benefits for both students and ALNA.

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