AnyLogic allows you to build a simulation model using multiple methods: System Dynamics, Agent Based and Discrete Event (Process‐centric) modeling. Moreover, you can combine different methods in one model: put agents into an environment whose dynamics is defined in SD style, use process diagrams or SD to define internals of agents, etc, etc. Any kind of mixed architecture is possible due to flexible object‐oriented AnyLogic modeling language. The choice of model architecture (how to partition the model into components, what to aggregate, which granularity to use, what behavior is best mapped to a process diagram, and what – to a statechart, etc) belongs mainly to the domain of art and intuition of the modeler and is outside the scope of this short tutorial. The goal of this tutorial is to show step‐by‐step how to build a combined AB+SD model in AnyLogic using one particular architecture. We will highlight the “points of interaction” of agents and system dynamics and try to show that model elements belonging to different approaches live a single space of AnyLogic model and can easily access each other. Having completed this tutorial you should be able to build various multi‐method models with more confidence and efficiency.
AnyLogic allows you to build a simulation model using multiple methods: System Dynamics, Agent Based and Discrete Event (Process‐centric) modeling. Moreover, you can combine different methods in one model: put agents into an environment whose dynamics is defined in SD style, use process diagrams or SD to define internals of agents, etc, etc. Any kind of mixed architecture is possible due to flexible object‐oriented AnyLogic modeling language. The choice of model architecture (how to partition the model into components, what to aggregate, which granularity to use, what behavior is best mapped to a process diagram, and what – to a statechart, etc) belongs mainly to the domain of art and intuition of the modeler and is outside the scope of this short tutorial. The goal of this tutorial is to show step‐by‐step how to build a combined AB+SD model in AnyLogic using one particular architecture. We will highlight the “points of interaction” of agents and system dynamics and try to show that model elements belonging to different approaches live a single space of AnyLogic model and can easily access each other. Having completed this tutorial you should be able to build various multi‐method models with more confidence and efficiency.