We are pleased to announce that OPSIM 3.7 is now available to all existing users, containing several new reports, the ability to exclude certain task lists from specific reports, a new tool for visualising milestone "pathways" where flow control allows for branching possibilities, a few other enhancements and a minor bugfix.

New Reports

The Logged Property Box Plots report gives box plots & a table showing the distribution by month of the value of a property logged with the Logger block. This could be used for lots of things, from tracking the utilisation of storage to providing statistics on the metocean data itself. Note that the logger can generate very large databases, however.

The Monthly Delay by Start Date graph shows the delay not exceeded at the requested percentile of probability in each month, as a function of the month in which the delay occurred (the horizontal axis of the plot) and the month in which the task list commenced operation (each series on the plot). This is thus useful for long-running campaigns where the month where delay occurs may be quite removed from the month where operations originally started.

If the graph is a bit tricky to read in "print" view, export to Excel and you can then activate & disable the different series as required. Note that "Per Task Output" must be enabled on the Task List for this report.

The Violin Plot is similar to the box plot, in showing the distribution of duration, delay or cost by the month in which the task list started. Whereas the box plot shows information just for min, max, median and two other selected percentiles, the violin plot shows a continuous distribution which conveys more information, at the expense of being harder to interpret than the box plots.

By default, each month is plotted at the same scale, so you can directly compare width / area between months, but if there is a lot of difference in the range of values between months, and this makes the plot hard to read, you can also make each individual item fit to the available width.

Exclude Certain Reports

OPSIM has traditionally worked on the assumption that if you add a certain report to the model, that report should provide output for each possible data source (typically a task list) that it finds results for in the database.

This worked well when the selection of reports was small, but now you might have a model with two task lists, and decide that for one the best representation would be a box plot, and for the other, the new violin plot. That would mean two graphs (and a table) included in the report that you didn't actually want.

It is now possible, via a new 'Included Blocks' tab on the report block, to untick any blocks in the model that should be ignored by that report, thus allowing for a report that contains only what you actually need.

Milestone Pathway Visualiser Tool

An item in a task list schedule can record a milestone - the completion of some phase of the operation, and from this both a time series (via a report) and a graphical (via the existing Gantt Chart tool) representation of the distribution of these milestones can be obtained.

In the past, these features have only been available providing the same milestones are encountered in the same order in each simulation (and that it is only the timing that varies). However this means that these cannot then be used if branching logic in the flow control of your task list means that this order can vary.

This tool allows for the visualisation of those different pathways to see where divergence and convergence occurs, and in particular, with what frequency any given pathway is followed. This helps for fixing errors in model logic where unexpected pathways are occurring, while also allowing for evaluation of legitimate differences to see if the milestone reports can be used or not (in which case a tickbox allows the order checks to be overridden).

E.g. if there is one pathway that occurs the majority of the time then the summary statistics are probably useful, while if there are several pathways that occur with similar frequency, then perhaps the Px start time of the activities that can occur in this variable order is a less meaningful result.

Enhancements to Text Notes

It can sometimes be useful to show key limits or number of trips to carry out, etc. within a text note in the model window. However this only worked if these values are fixed.

It is now possible to put a placeholder into a text note that will then read its value from a Scenarios block. If the value can vary depending on the scenario, then it will only be shown during playback mode (with the correct value corresponding to the current playback). If the value doesn't change, that it will be shown at all times. This feature is also supported by the text note report, which has been updated accordingly.

Other Changes

• An automatic FINISH milestone will be shown on the Gantt chart / milestone report - this has always been present in the database but not shown, and this information is useful given that the duration of the previous bar will not necessarily give the same data.
• During playback mode, hovering the cursor over a task list will now display the full name of the current task.
• Bugfix for vessel entity not saving the "Disable Scaled Playback" option.