Why the gap matters
Hand a high-speed packaging line to a graduate who has only ever modeled entities in queues, and they have two options. One is to aggregate bulk material into pseudo-entities, which gives a model too slow to be useful. The other is to reach for a combined discrete/continuous language and start writing differential equations.
Both are documented dead ends. The rate-based alternative treats material as flow, which is what it physically is in these plants, and it's barely represented in curricula. The industries that hire industrial and process engineers in the largest numbers are the ones the standard tooling models worst.
This gap is the reason the method exists. Attempts to represent bulk product as discrete entities give models that are either too slow or too inaccurate to use. Students who have seen both paradigms can tell which problem is in front of them.
This isn't a new idea for us.
Purdue University appears on our industry user list alongside Boeing, Eli Lilly and Los Alamos. Academic users have been part of this from the beginning.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville uses ReliaSim in its coursework today.
Amber Siprelle spent eight years there as a lecturer in Business Analytics, Simulation Modeling and Supply Chain Management, so the program below is written by someone who has built a course around this material rather than only licensed it.
What is included
Academic license
| Item | Included |
|---|---|
| ReliaSim licenses for a named course or research group | Free |
| The demo model library, including the bottling-line series | Yes |
| The browser Sandbox, for coursework with no install at all | Yes |
| Documentation and the published-paper archive | Yes |
| A session with the team to set up the first exercise | On request |
Who it is for
- Industrial and systems engineering: a simulation course that covers rate-based modeling alongside discrete-event, rather than treating continuous processes as an edge case.
- Chemical and process engineering, where the material is a flow and the standard simulation tooling fits worst.
- Food science and packaging: make-store-pack structures, changeovers, shelf-life constraints and the interaction between them.
- Operations research: scheduling, buffer sizing and constraint identification on systems where the constraint moves.
- Capstone and thesis work: students modeling a real line at a sponsoring plant.
What we ask in return
Nothing that costs money, just two things that take a little effort:
- Cite the method where it informs published work. The discrete-rate literature is linked from the ChiAha paper archive.
- Tell us what you built. We'd rather hear that an exercise didn't work than not hear at all. Course material that comes back to us gets shared with the next department that asks.
The license covers teaching and non-commercial research. Funded research on behalf of a commercial sponsor, and any use that produces a deliverable for a company, needs a commercial license. Those terms are on the pricing page.
Getting started
Before you ask for anything, you can try the whole thing. The browser Sandbox has four tiers of models, from discrete-rate flow to a real bottling line, with saved engine results and no download, sign-up or license. It's the fastest way to judge whether this belongs in your course.
When you're ready, register the course below. It takes a minute, and a person reads every one. If you'd rather just write, reliasim@chiaha.com reaches the same people.
Register a course
There's no fee and no student license to buy. We ask you to register so we know who is teaching with it and how many students it reaches. That's the only number this program is judged on, and it tells the next department that someone else has already done this.
Registered. Thank you.
We'll be in touch within two business days with the license and the course materials. If you gave a term, we will follow up before it starts.
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