ReliaSim® vs Plant Simulation
A Factory-Wide 3D Platform and a Purpose-Built Line Simulator

Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation models, simulates and analyzes production systems and logistics, with 3D models, energy and cost analysis and optimization. ReliaSim is built for production lines, especially high-speed ones, modeled as flow from each line’s own stop history. This page sets out where each fits.

What Plant Simulation is built for

Siemens describes Plant Simulation as software to “model, simulate, visualize and analyze production systems and logistics processes” (Plant Simulation product page). It builds object-oriented, hierarchical 3D models of plants and lines, from included libraries or CAD data, and covers discrete and continuous processes. Its analysis tools include automatic bottleneck detection, throughput, utilization of machines, resources and buffers, energy consumption, cost analysis, Sankey diagrams and Gantt charts. Optimization uses experiment management, neural networks and genetic algorithms, and it connects through OPC UA, MQTT, ODBC, JSON and XML and to other Siemens tools. Plant Simulation X comes in three preconfigured packages and has a 30-day free trial (plans page).

Where Plant Simulation is the better fit

• A Siemens digital factory. If your engineering already runs on Teamcenter and TIA Portal, a simulation tool in the same family has obvious advantages.
• Factory-wide logistics and layout. Material flow across a whole plant, in 3D from CAD, is its core use.
• Energy and cost alongside throughput. Energy consumption and cost analysis are built in.
• Connected systems. Its industrial interfaces suit teams linking the model to automation and shop-floor data.

ReliaSim doesn’t try to match that factory-wide scope.

Where ReliaSim fits

The price is on the page

A ReliaSim desktop license is $8,000 per user per year, and you can buy it online. ReliaStats, the companion tool that fits failure and repair distributions from your stop data, is $1,800 per user per year, and its Designer is free. The Sandbox and the desktop demo cost nothing. Every price is on the pricing page.

Discrete rate, built for high-speed lines

A discrete event model moves each unit through the line as its own event. On a line that makes hundreds of units a minute, that’s a great many events per simulated hour. ReliaSim uses discrete rate simulation, which models material as flow at rates and changes state only when a rate changes: a machine stops or restarts, or a buffer fills or empties. The work grows with the number of stops, not the number of units. A thousand one-year runs of the five-machine demo bottling line take about two and a half minutes on a laptop, or 0.154 seconds per simulated year. That speed is what makes sweeps practical: the buffer study behind how big should a buffer be? is 7,770 runs in 31.8 seconds. Discrete rate vs discrete event explains the difference in full.

Validated before it predicts

A published food plant model, from Fischel and Lange at the 2020 Winter Simulation Conference, was rebuilt in ReliaSim and independently validated by Tom Lange. It came within 1% of the plant’s measured OEE (the validation study). Every ReliaSim model follows the same order: reproduce the line’s own history, failure mode by failure mode, then ask what-if. How to check a digital twin’s accuracy claim sets out the test, for any vendor.

Your data stays on your machine

ReliaSim is desktop software for Mac and Windows. Models are files on the modeler’s own machine, and it works air-gapped. Security and deployment covers what IT usually asks.

At a glance

Using both

A plant modeled end to end in a factory platform can still send one line’s question to ReliaSim: what a buffer, a speed-up or a fixed failure mode returns, given that line’s own stop history, with replications cheap enough to show the spread.

How to choose

If the question spans a whole plant’s logistics, layout and energy, and you work in the Siemens ecosystem, a factory platform is the direct route. If it’s about what a production line will really make and what each fix is worth, start with a model built from the line’s stops and checked against its measured OEE. Siemens, Tecnomatix and Plant Simulation are referenced here for identification only; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.