Results matter, and, in the immortal words of Albert Einstein, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." That's why the ability to test out different scenarios with simulation is so important in getting the right results, and keeping us sane! But when you get results how do you visualize them?

With so many options to visualize and analyze results these days, Craig Kemp, SIMUL8 intern, raises some interesting questions and new ideas in our August article "Words divide, pictures unite". We also have all the latest SIMUL8 News, the results of our survey competition, and a special offer to speed up your simulations.

August Article

Words divide, pictures unite

Ever get the feeling that you are suffering from a data overload?

Ok, let me set the scene, I recently built a model, ran it, modified it, ran it again, tweaked it a bit, ran...you get the idea. So anyway, I am now sitting here staring at results from 10 key runs, with 3 KPIs each. That's 30 individual pieces of data staring back at me. Which run and model set-up is optimum? Well, where do I start? Run 7 had excellent Throughput, but the Resources were very underutilized, run 3 had good Throughput and used the Resources well too, but then so did run 9...

I decided to turn my attention to visualization as a better way to 'see' my data. I exported my data to an off the shelf visualization software package and created a scatter plot to compare each run, with the x-axis, the y-axis and the size of the plot on the graph all corresponding to one of my KPIs. This allowed me to have a visual display of all my results and compare each run side by side.

With data visualization being such a 'hot topic' these days, it got me thinking about how data visualization could play a role in the development of discrete event simulation data, in particular, how we can visualize our results to cope with the masses of data that are produced at the end of each run, and then allow visualizations to provide us with an even deeper understanding of our models.

As an example, I created a 'word cloud' of this article that you can see in the image. Basically, the cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the article. It gives you a snapshot of the article in one quick look - data, visualization and results. Could this approach be used for simulation?

How do you visualize your results? Bar charts, Line graphs, maybe Radar graphs? Or maybe none at all!

It would be great to hear about your visual solutions, why not let me know your techniques or send in your images on our blog?

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