About Experiences

Experiences allow a Simulation Methods Developer in an organization to capture the best practices and intellectual property that are encapsulated in a well-designed simulation process or simulation activity. The organization can then use the same experiences to disseminate the information encapsulated by the simulation process or activity to a variety of Process Composer analysts.

See Also
Understanding What is Captured by an Experience
Preparing an Experience for Release
Managing Instantiation Options
About Simulation Attributes
About Parameters
Instantiating a Simulation Process from an Experience
Instantiating a Simulation Activity from an Experience

A Simulation Methods Developer can use the following techniques to create an experience:

  • Save a simulation process or activity as a new template
  • Create an empty template
  • Assign a simulation process or an activity to an existing template

Experiences are created by a Simulation Methods Developer; however, a Simulation Analyst can instantiate an experience and execute the resulting simulation process or simulation activity. As a result, the best practices and the intellectual property captured by the experience can be duplicated by a larger group of users who may not have the engineering knowledge to create the original simulation process or activity.

Experiences can be either simulation process experiences or simulation activity experiences, depending on how they were created. Simulation process experiences can be used to create only a simulation process (and the activities it contains). Simulation activity experiences can be used to create only a simulation activity. You can determine which simulation processes or activities were created by a particular experience. In addition, when you are searching you can choose to display only the simulation processes or activities that were created by a particular experience.

An experience includes the following instantiation options:

  • Title, Description, and Policy of the simulation process or activity
  • Attributes and their values
  • Parameters and their values
  • Referenced content (documents or VPM data)
  • Execution options

The Simulation Methods Developer can choose one of the following Display Modes for an instantiation option:

  • Hide the option
  • Show the option as read-only
  • Allow the user to edit the option
  • Require the user to enter a value

The Simulation Methods Developer can modify the display mode of an instantiation option, and Process Composer applies the display mode when the Simulation Analyst instantiates the experience. This allows the Simulation Methods Developer to control how much access the Simulation Analyst is granted to specified fields. For example, if the value of an attribute should remain fixed, the Simulation Methods Developer can hide the field containing the attribute from the Simulation Analyst during instantiation. Conversely, the Simulation Methods Developer can force the Simulation Analyst to provide a value for an attribute by marking the display mode as required.

Note: The Simulation Methods Developer can also control the behavior of an option after the object is instantiated in Performance Study, as described in Controlling the Instantiation Options in Performance Study.

The Simulation Methods Developer can attach a document containing files to the experience. The files are expected to contain instructions to guide a Simulation Analyst when using the experience to create simulation processes or activities. For example, the instructions might include the following:

  • Images of the part being simulated along with its dimensions. The dimensions could indicate what is being referred to by, say, radius1, radius2, and length.
  • A description of how the parameters and attributes are used by a simulation.
  • A sample report so that the user can know what to expect after running the simulation.

If the Simulation Methods Developer creates a well-designed simulation process experience, the Simulation Analyst should be able to do the following:

  • Instantiate the experience.
  • Modify some of the attributes of the resulting simulation.
  • Execute the simulation process.
  • Make engineering decisions based on the results that are returned by the simulation process and repeat the simulation process of modifying the attributes and executing the process, as needed.