GoldSim: The Swiss Army Knife of Simulation Tools

Posted by Ryan Roper

I recently sat in on a great guest webinar (John's Grab Bag of Tips 'n' Tricks) presented by a long-time GoldSim user, John Tauxe, and I was impressed by how he has stretched the bounds of GoldSim's capabilities. At its core, GoldSim is a versatile simulation tool that incorporates probabilistic, discrete events and system dynamics modeling. That alone makes it quite unique among simulation tools. With nearly 40 core elements as well as almost 20 more specialized elements, there is significant flexibility in the way you can model physical, engineered, financial and business systems. If you think about it long enough, there's probably a way to do what you need to do with the built-in elements and modeling capabilities of GoldSim.

http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/the-ultimate-swiss-army-knife

But John's webinar also highlighted a whole other world of things that you can do with GoldSim. From internal documentation to graphics drawing tools to dashboards and more, GoldSim is more than just its core simulation capabilities. In the world of simulation tools, it's actually quite like having a corkscrew, nail file, scissors and toothpick on your pocket knife. Here, I want to highlight a few things that stood out to me in John's webinar. I'd also like to make mention of some features of GoldSim that I have used to my advantage in developing a system for automated verification testing of GoldSim. This includes using Spreadsheet elements to export test results to Excel, recording Time Series elements to store expected results for comparison and a batch file to run multiple tests automatically one after the other.

GoldSim in the Academic Community

Posted by Ryan Roper

Most of you are probably aware that GoldSim is used for a wide variety of commercial applications including mine water balance, water resource management, radioactive waste management, project planning and risk and reliability analysis. There are active commercial users in over 50 countries (http://www.goldsim.com/Web/Solutions/Customers/). In addition to these, however, we have another group of users that you may not be aware of: the academic community. There are GoldSim academic licenses at about 150 universities in over 40 different countries.

Learning to Use GoldSim

Posted by Rick Kossik

I am often asked what is the best way to learn GoldSim. Although GoldSim’s intuitive interface will tempt you to simply dive in and start playing with the software, you are strongly discouraged from doing so, even if you are an experienced modeler.  Spending an hour or so up front (by following a few basic steps) is the quickest and most effective way to understand the software’s features and capabilities and start building models in GoldSim. This blog provides some simple tips.