Rockwell Automation Arena Basic Edition Users Guide User Manual

Page 25

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As the simulation progresses, you’ll see small entity pictures resembling pages moving
among the flowchart shapes. Also, a variety of variables change values as entities are
created and processed, as illustrated below.

If the animation is moving too fast, you can slow it down by adjusting the animation scale
factor. For this, you have the following choices:

Open the Run Setup dialog box via the Run > Speed > Animation Speed Factor
menu item and enter a smaller value (e.g., 0.005) for the scale factor; or

Use the less-than (<) key during the run to decrease the scale factor by 20%. Be sure
that the model window is active—not the Navigate panel—or > and < won’t take
effect. Pressing < repeatedly is an easy way to fine tune the animation speed. The
greater-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 ani-
mation; move the slider to the right to speed up the animation..

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 Review Application 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 shape was entered
incorrectly (e.g., if you typed 12—the rejection probability—instead of 88), the variables
would show that many more applications were leaving the Returned branch.

If Arena displays an

error message, you

can use the Find

button in the error

window to locate the

source of the

problem. You can

change between the

error and model

windows by selecting

them from the

Window menu.

Create: Number of

Decide: Number of

entities created

entities out each branch

Process: Number of entities
currently in process

Dispose: Number of
entities disposed

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 begn

the run again.