ReliaSim for Teaching and Research
Free for Coursework and Non-Commercial Work
Simulation is taught almost entirely as discrete-event modelling — entities moving through queues. That world view is the right one for a job shop and the wrong one for a bottling line, a mill or a continuous process. ReliaSim licences are free for classroom teaching and non-commercial academic research so students can work in both.
Why the gap matters
A graduate who has only ever modelled entities in queues will, when handed a high-speed packaging line, either aggregate bulk material into pseudo-entities — producing a model that runs too slowly to be useful — or 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 is barely represented in curricula. That is a teaching gap, not a vendor complaint: the industries that hire industrial and process engineers in the largest numbers are exactly the ones the standard tooling models worst.
This is not a hypothetical distinction. It is the reason the method exists: attempts to represent bulk product as discrete entities yield 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 is not 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 teaches with it today — ReliaSim is used in UTK coursework.
Amber Siprelle spent eight years there as a lecturer in Business Analytics, Simulation Modeling and Supply Chain Management, so the programme below is written by someone who has built a course around this material rather than only licensed it.
What is included
Academic licence
| Item | Included |
|---|---|
| ReliaSim licences 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 modelling alongside discrete-event, rather than treating continuous processes as an edge case.
- Chemical and process engineering — where the material genuinely 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 modelling a real line at a sponsoring plant.
What we ask in return
Nothing that costs money. Two things that cost 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 would rather hear that an exercise did not work than not hear at all. Course material that comes back to us gets shared with the next department that asks.
The licence 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 licence — those terms are on the pricing page.
Getting started
Before you ask for anything, you can try the whole thing: the browser sandbox runs eight bottling-line models with no download, no sign-up and no licence. It is the fastest way to judge whether this belongs in your course.
When you are ready, email reliasim@chiaha.com with your institution, the course or research group, roughly how many students, and what you want them to be able to do by the end. A person reads it.
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