Porting Arena to SIMIO

[jomiller]

For those of use who were past Arena users for many years, is there a way to port Arena models to SIMIO?  Or are there suggestions on other strategies to use when trying to capture at least part of the logic from an Arena model?

[dsturrock]

There is no easy way to automatically convert an Arena model into Simio. But more important, you probably wouldn't want to.

I am reminded of the early days when Siman was written in FORTRAN and we wanted it to be in C. We ran it through the best automatic FORTRAN to C translator of the day. While it "technically" worked, what we got was a whole bunch of FORTRAN code that was expressed in the C language. It used algorithms and constructs that were inappropriate to C and was extremely hard to read and maintain. We ultimately manually recoded everything into "good" C code.

Likewise, Simio has many advanced constructs that are not found in Arena. The modeling approach that you would take with Simio's object orientation, would be very different that you would take with Arena's limited set of procedural modules. So while it is theoretically possible, I would recommend giving no further thought to an automatic translation. Instead I would:

• go back to the modeling objectives and constraints which guided your Arena model,  
• consider all the things you learned about the system as you developed the Arena model, and
• consider the trade offs that you had to make in Arena to model your system with enough accuracy.

Then I would design a Simio model using all the Simio features available and design the best model to meet your current needs. When complete, I expect that you would find the Simio model to be smaller, more accurate, and easier to use and maintain than the original Arena model.