Your First Simulation

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Overview

This guide walks you through building and running a basic simulation in ProDex. By the end you’ll have a working model, a captured Snapshot, a completed run, and results you can explore. The fastest path is conversational — describe what you want to Dexter and the agent builds it. The walkthrough below covers the manual path so you understand each piece; both paths produce the same artifacts.

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Step 1: Pick a Factory and Create a Model

A model lives inside a factory. Pick the factory you want to work in from the global selector at the top, then open the Modeler and create a new model. Give it a name and an optional description. The model is your container — every component, configuration field, and run lives inside it.

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Step 2: Define Your Entities

Entities are the items that flow through your simulation — raw materials, intermediates, and finished goods. They’re factory-scoped, so anything you define here is reusable across every model in the same factory. In the Modeler’s left panel, open the Library tab. At the bottom of the panel are Entities and Lookups buttons — click Entities to open the modal and add the items your model needs.

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Step 3: Build the Model Graph

The canvas is where you build your simulation as a graph of connected components. The Library tab on the left holds the component palette — these are the draggable nodes:

• Source — generates entities and introduces them into the model
• Process — applies a delay, optionally consuming resources
• Buffer — holds entities in a queue with an optional capacity limit
• Router — splits entity flow based on conditions you define
• Station — a capacity-constrained container that groups components into a work center
• Combiner, Separator, Transformer — actions that batch entities together, split one into many, or change entity type. They’re typically attached to a Station rather than acting as standalone nodes.
• Sink — removes entities from the model. The exit point.

Resources aren’t dragged onto the canvas. They’re model-scoped capacity pools (workers, machines) defined in the side panel and attached to Processes that draw from them. Drag a component from the Library onto the canvas, then connect components by dragging from one node’s output handle to another’s input handle. The minimum viable model is Source → Process → Sink.

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Step 4: Configure Components

Click any component on the canvas to open its configuration panel. Key things to configure:

• Source — which entity type to generate, arrival logic (a fixed value, a distribution, or a DSL expression)
• Process — processing time, resource requirements, optional Station placement
• Router — routing logic (conditional rules, percentage splits, or round-robin)
• Resource (in the side panel) — capacity, allocation discipline

Most numeric fields accept either a literal value or an expression. Expressions let you reference constants, lookup tables, entity attributes, and simulation state.

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Step 5: Set Simulation Duration

In the model’s top bar, set how long the simulation should run using the DDD:HH:MM:SS picker — pick days, hours, minutes, and seconds of simulated time directly. This controls the length of each run. If you want the run anchored to wall-clock time (real shifts, real release times), pair the model with a schedule — see Schedules.

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Step 6: Capture a Snapshot

Click the disk icon in the Modeler’s top bar to open the Create Snapshot dialog. Give it a name (e.g., “First run baseline”) and an optional description, then click Create Snapshot. See Snapshots for when to capture and how Snapshots flow into experiments.

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Step 7: Run the Simulation

The run controls live at the bottom of the canvas — Run simulation (green play), Step, and Playback speed. Click Run simulation to execute the model end-to-end. The play button doubles as the validation indicator. Green means the model is valid and ready. Red means there’s a specific blocker; hover the button to see the error and a Fix with Assistant action that hands the failure to Dexter for a one-click proposal. A running simulation shows progress on the canvas. The finished run appears in your model’s run list — you can pick it up there if you navigate away before it completes.

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Step 8: Review Results

Open Results to see your run’s output:

• KPI cards — summary metrics like throughput, utilization, cycle time. KPIs are defined per model and computed automatically after every run.
• Charts — line, bar, histogram, scatter, and more, configured on your model.
• Simulation Event Log — a row-level trace of every entity creation, process start, route, and event-hook firing during the run, opened from the top bar.

From here you can compare this run against others, click Export PDF in the top bar for a polished report, or ask Dexter for an Excel export of the underlying data.

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What’s Next

• Add more components to model a more realistic facility — see Modeler for the full component reference
• Define Constants and Lookup Tables to parameterize your model
• Run an Experiment to test multiple Snapshots side by side
• Use Monte Carlo to quantify how sensitive your results are to randomness
• Ask Dexter to analyze your results or suggest improvements