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Traditional Marketing Mix models attempt to explore the tradeoffs amongst different marketing channels and the spends associated with them. The weaknesses of these models are, generally, their static nature and the restrictive assumptions required to apply their results. For these reasons, an American pharmaceutical company, one of the largest in the world, engaged with Sterling Simulation to explore the benefits of agent-based modeling, prior to launching a new product. The use-case was presented by Scott Hebert, Vice President of Sterling Simulation at the AnyLogic Conference 2015.

As the hubs of economic activity, cities drive the vast majority of the world’s energy use and are major contributors to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Nowadays, roughly half of the world’s population is living in urban areas, and this share is increasing over time, projected to reach 60% by 2030. Cities are responsible for the largest consumption of energy resources worldwide – between 60 to 80% – and account for a roughly equal share of global CO2 emissions. The European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER) is a European economic interest group whose mission is to develop know-how and innovative solutions and products for the management of energy and related economic and environmental questions. Dr. Enrique Kremers from EIFER evaluates energy policies and their impact on reducing energy consumption to improve energy efficiency.

The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) is a Fortune 500 Company offering diversified financial services and insurance to people and families that serve or have served in the United States Military. With nearly 12 million members and various services, it is imperative that USAA’s business initiatives with strategic objectives of the enterprise are aligned. To accomplish this alignment, USAA combines advanced analytics, simulation methods, and enterprise architecture concepts to create dynamic and systemic models of the enterprise. A major catalyst in these efforts is Dr. Bipin Chadha, Data Scientist at USAA who has developed several decision support models for strategic planning, capability roadmaps, operational risk analysis, capacity planning and scheduling, and portfolio optimization.

The military aircraft maintenance turnaround process is highly complex and includes multiple interacting and parallel workflows between humans and machines. Lockheed Martin, one of the largest companies in the aerospace, defense, security, and technologies industry sought to improve decision-making in regards to the complete turnaround process and to identify process changes that could be implemented to reduce turnaround time. There are two distinct features unique to the project. One being the use of AnyLogic to model people, machines and workstations, and how they interact, which identified previously unknown workflow peculiarities. The second, a portable Android tablet application developed and tested by the team for workflow authoring and data collection that provided the input data to the process simulation model.

A smart bike sharing system can provide fast and easy access to public transportation where short trips are common for a large portion of the population. Urban planning officials in the City of Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico believe the socioeconomic conditions along with its societies adherence to this mode of transportation combined with the urban trace and physical conditions encourage the adoption of a bike sharing system. The City of Leon contracted Karla Margarita Gamez Pérez, Eleazar Puente Rivera, and her team from The University of Monterrey to research the possibility of a bike sharing system prior to implementation. Karla’s team chose AnyLogic Software for simulation modeling to carry out the design and dimensioning of the system.

A multi-national pharmaceutical company recently launched a new non-generic drug. Since the company already owned the leading non-generic drug in that market, cannibalization was a concern. The goal was to create market share for the new drug, while maintaining or increasing market share for the well-established drug by modifying types of promotional spend. Traditionally, the Analytics Department would employ a Marketing-Mix Model (MMM) to determine the impact of promotional spend, but the company was looking for further insight into the mechanics behind the MMM. After exploring multiple options, they determined agent-based modeling, and ultimately AnyLogic would allow for the greatest flexibility and visualization.

If you have ever created a railyard consisting of multiple railway tracks in AnyLogic, then you might be familiar with the hint described in the video. If not, watch it and learn how convert GIS shapefiles to AnyLogic rail markup. It will save your time while building the railroad model and acquaint you with the Railroad library.

Quick question: how old were the characters of the famous “Friends” TV-show? Not a clue? Watch our new video to know the answer and find out how to read agent attributes from a database in AnyLogic! The new video shows how to create a population of agents and read the agent attributes from a database with the example of six friends from the TV-show. You will also learn how to add parameters to each agent and upload the database table from Excel file.

We continue educating you with how-to videos on advanced features of AnyLogiс. See the first video post in our blog and all the videos on AnyLogic YouTube channel. In today’s video, we use a practical model of bookstore positioning to show how to place agents on the AnyLogic GIS map.

Building on AnyLogic’s educational resources, I am happy to share the “Creating Cars of Different Colors” video, just one in a long-line of how-to videos geared toward simplifying AnyLogic’s vast number of features and functions. In this video, you will learn how to create cars of different colors in the road traffic library, using an example model available in your AnyLogic software.