OVERVIEW

The working simulation tool for the models in this book is Arena. Arena is a simulation environment consisting of module templates, built around SIMAN language constructs and other facilities, and augmented by a visual front end. This chapter provides an overview of Arena basics at an introductory level. For more detail, refer to Kelton et al. (2004). Because it may be hard to distinguish between Arena terms and generic terms, we shall always italicize any technical Arena terms throughout the book. Furthermore, we will adopt the notational convention that all characters in SIMAN constructs are always uppercase, while only the first character in Arena constructs is capitalized, and both are italicized.

SIMAN consists of two classes of objects: blocks and elements. More specifically, blocks are basic logic constructs that represent operations; for example, a SEIZE block models the seizing of a service facility by a transaction (referred to in Arena as "entity"), while a RELEASE block releases the facility for use by other transactions. Elements are objects that represent facilities, such as RESOURCES and QUEUES, or other components, such as DSTATS and TALLIES, used for statistics collection.

Arena's fundamental modeling components, called modules, are selected from template panels, such as Basic Process, Advanced Process, and Advanced Transfer, ^[1] and placed on a canvas in the course of model construction. A module is a high-level construct, composed of SIMAN blocks and/or elements. For example, a Process