Capability Overview

This is an overview of Planimate's capabilities.

User Interfaces and Displays

Planimate can be used to build self-contained applications or as a component of a larger system. Its animation window can be embedded in a dotNET application. Its inbuilt user interface compoenents include:

• Attribute, Cell and Table Views
• Dials
• Interactive Graph Views
• Portal and Panel Clicks and Drags
• Dynamic visibility control of Paint, Table, Graph views
• Paint Object Clicks
• Object State Icons
• Animation of logic / decision trees
• Animation of resources over a map
• Pipe Animation
• Item clicks information popups
• Pop up panels
• Dialog boxes
• Dynamically generated hierarchic menus and popups
• Viewports
• RTF text view/editing
• Embedded media player control
• Function key broadcasts
• Mouse Hovers

Planimate can operate without a user interface, either in a scheduled batch run mode or as a back end simulation server.

Data Interchange

There are many options to getting data in and out of Planimate, including real time data feeds for live updates. Options include:

• CSV/TAB delimited files
• SQL Query using ODBC
• DataSet2 files (encrypted, protected files)
• XML packets via TCP/IP or UDP
• Command line parameters
• Data passed to and returned from a called DLL
• Planimate dotNET API (Planimate DLL)
• HTTP request received by internal server
• HTTP request sent to a webserver
• Dynamic loading and saving of images
• System Clipboard
• Parameters passed to a newly created subprocess

Simulation Engine

At Planimate's heart is a powerful simulation modelling engine enabling general

programming as well as discrete event simulation. The engine has been in development since

1989 with a focus on both performance and providing a robust framework which manages the

complexities of many parallel activities in a dynamic whole system model.

• Scheduling/ordering of events with renegging
• Dynamic changes to model topology
• Dynamic creation of network nodes and links
• Lookahead/commit/rollback paradigm is implicit
• Support for tens of thousands of network nodes
• Messaging and Broadcasting with completion wait
• Calendar and Relative time modes of operation
• Real time synchronisation for live display applications
• Graphical flow based programming
• Textual routine proramming with powerful functions
• Expression language with boolean math and scientific functions
• Compiler-less enabling in-place debugging
• DLL calling interface designed for efficiency and large data exchange
• String manipulation

Intra-model Communication Paths

A key to a model's success is the way physical object and information flows are represented. Planimate supports many powerful flow mechanisms:

• Item flows with hierarchy
• Attributes, Tables and Lists
• Messages (like a phone call)
• Broadcasts (like an announcement over a radio)
• Carried Items
• Wormholes
• Track links, for with fine level control of train movements
• Spatial links for transport corridors
• Pipes which animate the movement of numerical data