We are pleased to announce a new feature available in AnyLogic 6 Professional Edition: now you are able to save the full state of a model (the snapshot) during runtime to a file, restore it at a later time and continue running simulation from the same point. This feature may be useful in several cases:
- Resilience: when a simulation takes very long time to complete, it may make sense to save its state periodically so that you do not have to start everything from scratch when e.g. the computer crashes.
- Skipping warm-up period: if you plan to run several scenarios with a simulation that differ only in what happens to the model after it warms up, you may run the model up to the end of its warm-up period only once, save the state, and then reload it for every scenario.
- Running distributed simulations: many parallel/distributed simulation frameworks require the ability to roll-back the model to some previous state (checkpoint). This may be needed to synchronize the clocks of concurrent simulations when one of them happens to “run too far”.
- Any other case when you need to refer to a particular state of the model without running the simulation from the initial state.
AnyLogic model snapshot implementation is based on Java serialization mechanism.