AnyLogic

Kommentare: Overall experience with Anylogic is very good. I use it to model business systems and processes to collecting statistic or optimization.

Vorteile: - Integrate all types of simulation modelling in one tool. For example you can create multi-agent model, where agent's behaviour contains inner system dynamic model. At same every agent can act in dynamical changing world, where environment based on discrete event modelling.
- You can easy add your own program code lines to handle any event, that happens during modelling. For example you can send message on screen or send message to interact with other agent during events, such as arrive to destination point, take place in queue, leave queue, start processing on a device.
- You can create your own blocks and use them to build models like with standard block.
- You can create beautiful animated 3D presentation of your model.
- There are a lot of free tutorials, video lectures, examples, books that can help you start build complicated beautiful models. There is well done documentation with good tips and advises.
- You can every time ask support any question you want and they answer you in short.

Nachteile: - New versions of Anylogic comes very often, sometimes its annoying to reinstall it. You can skip one update, but there can be some problems.
- I notice that when you update Anylogic, your old models can stop working in new version of Anylogic, you had to fix syntax errors in models code. At same time modes, that you create in new version of Anylogic probably will not open in old version of Anylogic. Looks like developers not care about backward comparability when preparing updates. It can be real problems if Anylogic version is different on your home PC and on your PC at work. I hope developers will take my opinion in consideration and provide backward compatibility for next updates.

Kommentare: AnyLogic is an amazing piece of software but it comes like an iceberg: 90% is hidden under water. Getting started is easy but then the learning curve gets quite steep. It massively helps to know OOP because it sits on an Eclipse Java shell.
However, this allows you to do *anything*. Need to add this specific behavior? No problem. Want to use this Java package? Go for it.
I have been using it for 8+ years now in a huge variety of projects, from implementing massive simulations into Fortune500 companies to producing small on-the-fly models during meetings.
Once you get the hang, it is a lot of fun to have this power under your fingers. AnyLogic really is the only software out there that can combine agents, discrete-event processes and system dynamics, a feature that is massively underestimated yet. However, with the rise of Analytics and Big Data, it becomes ever more important to model close to reality.

Vorteile: Once you understand the core basics (OOP, Java, experimentation...), an immense bag of features and possibilities opens up.
The support subscription is quite good value for money as well.

Nachteile: The online community lives on a LinkedIn forum, this should move to a dedicated place or StackOverflow.