Getting Started

GETTING STARTED WITH ARENA
The animation
scale factor is the
amount of
simulated time
between
successive
screen updates.
Smaller values
provide smoother,
slower animation.
If the run finishes
before you have a
chance to explore
these controls,
answer No when
you’re asked if you
want to view the
results. Then click
Start Over on the
Run toolbar to
begin the run
again.
If the animation is moving too fast, you can slow it down by adjusting the animation
scale factor. To do this, you have these choices:
• Open the Run Setup dialog box by selecting the Run > Speed > Animation
Speed Factor and then enter a smaller value (for example, 0.005) for the scale
factor.
• Use the less-than () key speeds up
animation by 20%.
• Use the slider bar in the main toolbar. Move the slider to the left to slow down the
animation and to the right to speed it up.
To pause the simulation, click the Pause button or press the Esc key. With the
automatic flowchart animation, you can see how many entities have been created, are
currently in the Check for Proper Identification process, have left each branch of our
Decide module, and have left the model at each of our terminating Dispose modules.
These variables can be helpful in verifying the model. For example, if the probability
in the Decide module was entered incorrectly (for example, if you typed 9 as the
denied probability instead of 93), the variables would show that many more
applications were leaving the Denied branch.
You also can step through the simulation one event at a time. To do this, Pause the
simulation and then click the Step button or press the F10 key. Each time you step the
simulation, an entity is moved through the flowchart. Usually, you’ll see animation of
the entity’s movement, though sometimes no visual change will take place (for
example, when the next event is creating a new entity). When this occurs, just step
again to move forward to the next event.
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