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.

Examples of Dashboards

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

2018 Update: We have posted newer examples of dashboards using a newer version of GoldSim, here.

Do you want to add a dashboard to your GoldSim model but need some ideas on how to design it? Are you looking for ways to improve its functionality and ease of use? If so, maybe some of the examples shown below will give you some useful ideas. In this blog post, I have included screen captures of some models that highlight various approaches to building effective dashboards.

Modeling Runoff from Multiple Catchments using a Vector Splitter

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

If you have some flow of material or a transaction and need to divide it up or allocate it, likely you will use the Allocator or Splitter element in GoldSim. While these elements are very powerful and make the job a lot easier, there is one condition for which it was not specifically built: handling an array of input amounts. To address this, we have added some nice examples to our library that allow you to simulate allocations and splits on arrays of data. These examples provide an easy way to build powerful models that might have otherwise been quite difficult to build and maintain. I tested the array splitter example model using a real-world example that simulates rainfall runoff in a new stormwater management system, and this is described in this post.

Register for the GoldSim User Conference and Training Workshop Before July 31

Posted by Rick Kossik

The GoldSim User Conference is just around the corner.  It will be held in Seattle on September 24 and 25, 2015. The conference will be preceded (on September 22 and 23) by a two day training workshop (focusing on novice users). This training session prior to the conference provides a great opportunity for novice users to get trained and then stick around and meet and learn from experienced users. There is a 50% discount to those who register for the conference before July 31.

Using GoldSim to Simulate Projects

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

The planning and management of programs and large projects is inherently difficult, not only due to their complexity, but also because something almost always goes wrong (Murphy’s Law!). By combining the flexibility of a general-purpose and highly-graphical probabilistic simulation framework with specialized features to support financial modeling and scenario analysis, GoldSim is ideally suited as a high-level project planning tool suitable during the feasibility assessment and conceptual design phases, while the exact scope of the program is still in flux and it is critical to simulate the range of possible outcomes.

Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Space Missions Using GoldSim

Posted by Rick Kossik

Many of you are very familiar with how GoldSim has been used for many years to carry out simulations of environmental systems, such as mines, water supply systems and hazardous waste sites. However, because GoldSim was designed as a flexible probabilistic simulation system, there are many cool and interesting applications in a wide variety of other arenas.  Perhaps one of the most interesting is the use of GoldSim for probabilistic risks assessments of space missions.

Stakeholder Involvement for Environmental Flow Alternatives

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

Sometimes it is a challenge to involve a diverse audience in the modeling process of a complex system. It is important that you adequately reflect the complexities of the system while at the same time present the results clearly and concisely for people that have different perspectives. Recently, Ryan Morrison (USGS) and Mark Stone (Assistant professor at UNM) were able to leverage the visual and dynamic strengths of GoldSim to successfully involve a diverse group of stakeholders in evaluating flow alternatives for the Rio Chama basin, New Mexico. I wanted to highlight this modeling application because of its unique approach within the world of dynamic simulation and to demonstrate the utility of GoldSim's new scenario management capability.

Playing Mastermind with GoldSim

Posted by Ryan Roper

This last weekend, I went into nerd mode and created a GoldSim version of the classic game Mastermind. If you're not familiar with Mastermind, here's the Wikipedia article about it: Mastermind (board game). According to the article, "Mastermind...is a code-breaking game for two players. The modern game with pegs was invented in 1970 by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert. It resembles an earlier pencil and paper game called Bulls and Cows that may date back a century or more." I play this game with my kids and it often leaves me musing about what kind of strategy or algorithm I might devise to more systematically make guesses to solve the code. This musing usually lasts about 5 or 10 minutes before I decide it's not worth my time and I go on with my life. However, recently I thought it would be a fun and interesting exercise to create a GoldSim version of Mastermind.

White Space

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

The way you use white space in your GoldSim expressions can make a significant difference in readability. In this post, I walk through a series of examples that illustrate my personal preferences and pet peeves, which I hope might be useful for you as you establish guidelines within your modeling team.

Review of Academic Journal Articles that Refer to GoldSim

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

I recently searched for academic journal articles using Google Scholar to see what kinds of GoldSim applications have been written about in the past year or so. Despite the limitations inherent in this type of search, I was able to compile a reasonable list of modeling application categories. The results of this search returned a surprisingly broad spectrum of use cases in engineering, science and business. I was expecting to see one or two dominant areas of focus but instead found a rather uniform spectrum. Many of the applications incorporated uncertainty and/or decision support, which I was pleased to see.

Customizing GoldSim Element Icons

Posted by Ryan Roper

One of the strengths of GoldSim is that it offers several types of generic elements from which models can be constructed to represent almost any type of physical system. Because of the flexibility in how individual element types can be used as building blocks for complex systems, their default names and icons are generic. Element labels can be changed and element descriptions can be added to better indicate what an element represents. Another way to further customize an element to indicate what it represents is by changing the default element icon to a custom icon.

As an example, the default icon for a Container element is a simple box. But what if that Container represents the operations of a pump or the inventory in a warehouse? You may want to change the icon to a custom one that represents this function or purpose. In this post, we'll show you how to do this and we'll point you to an icon library on our website that already has a number of icons you might like to use.

GoldSim Applications at the Mine Water Solutions Conference

Posted by Rick Kossik

I've just returned from the Mine Water Solutions in Extreme Environments Conference in Vancouver, BC.  This biennial conference focuses on a wide range of issues associated with mine water management, particularly in extremely wet, dry and cold climates, and with extreme hydrogeological and geochemical issues.  As many of you know, GoldSim is used extensively worldwide for such applications, and as a result, GoldSim was commonly mentioned during the conference.  For example, in one of the keynote sessions, Lisa Wade of GoldCorp (one of the world's largest gold producers), described the company's Water Stewardship Strategy, which it uses to ensure water security and production, reduce costs and impacts, improve operations, and address stakeholder concerns.  During the talk, Lisa mentioned that as part of the Strategy, water management models at the various mine sites are all carried out using GoldSim.  In addition, during the conference a number of technical papers featuring GoldSim were presented. Two such applications are briefly summarized in this post.

American Water Resources Association 2015 Conference

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

I recently traveled to sunny Los Angeles, California for the AWRA 2015 Specialty Conference: "Water for Urban Areas: Managing Risks and Building Resiliency." All of the presentations I listened to were very interesting, some of which used GoldSim as the tool to facilitate the studies and results presented. The highlight of the trip, of course, was to visit with some of our customers and make new friends. I also learned more about some of the unique challenges California is facing due to continued population growth, climate change, water quality conditions, and aging infrastructures.

Mark Your Calendar for the GoldSim User Conference in September 2015!

Posted by Rick Kossik

We recently published this in our newsletter, but I thought it would be worthwhile to post here also. After a long hiatus, we plan to host a GoldSim User Conference in Seattle in September 2015.  The conference is just in the planning stages now, but the dates are very likely to be September 24 and 25.  The conference will be preceded (on September 22 and 23) by a two day training workshop (focusing on novice users).

GoldSim Applications at (Radioactive) Waste Management Conference

Posted by Rick Kossik

I've just returned from the Waste Management (WM) Conference in Phoenix, which we attend annually.  This conference attracts thousands of registrants from around the world and is widely regarded as the premier international conference for the management of radioactive material and related topics. As many of you know, although GoldSim is currently used in a wide variety of applications, it was originally developed to support radioactive waste management applications (if you are curious, I discussed this early history in a previous blog post). GoldSim continues to be used extensively worldwide for such applications, and typically during the conference a number of technical papers featuring GoldSim are presented. It is always rewarding and exciting to sit in a technical session at a conference and see how GoldSim has been applied to address an interesting and important problem.  A few such applications discussed at the conference are briefly summarized in this post.

Exploratory Modeling and GoldSim

Posted by Nick Martin

There is an interesting recent journal article, “Exploratory Modeling: Extracting Causality From Complexity” (Larsen et al. 2014), which describes the usefulness and success of exploratory modeling in the earth sciences. Although this article does not mention GoldSim, it provides a nice explanation of modeling philosophies which work well in GoldSim. These philosophies emphasize a “top-down” approach to modeling complex systems and focus on the representation of uncertainty in addressing “big-picture” issues.

Generic Mine Water Balance Model

Posted by Nick Martin

We frequently get requests for an example Mine Water Balance model with dashboards that can be used in sales presentations and as a technical demonstration tool. Recently, a GoldSim Mine Water Balance Model has been posted to the Model Library which fulfills these requirements.

Simulating a One-Armed Bandit

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

If you ever run into GoldSim employees in Las Vegas, you will never see them sitting in front of a slot machine. Dealing with probabilities on a daily basis gives us a feel for our odds when dealing with uncertainty. But what if we built a model that only simulates the one-armed bandit? This is the question I asked myself the other day when Rick mentioned the dice-rolling model. What I thought would end up to be a mere exercise in probabilities ended up in a little game that is almost as addicting as solitaire!

Using Period-Based Results in Model Calculations

Posted by Ryan Roper

We've had a number of support inquiries where users need some way of calculating period-based summary data (such as monthly or annual averages or cumulative amounts) for use in other calculations within the same model (e.g. post-processing). GoldSim's reporting periods feature is great for generating this sort of summary data with little effort on the part of the user, but these results are only intended to be viewed and not used for other subsequent calculations. If you do need to use these results for other calculations in the same model, our model library contains a number of examples that illustrate how to calculate such results manually. This blog post briefly describes some of these examples and points you to where you can find them in our library to see them in more detail.