The Birth of JaamSim

JaamSim has its origin in the simulation models we prepare for the oil & gas and mining industries. These models simulate the movement of products such as crude oil, LNG, coal, and iron ore from production through marine terminals and ships to their final destinations. You can view some videos of these models using the link from the JaamSim webpage or at our YouTube channel: JavaSimulation.

Long before JaamSim, we wrote our models in commercial off-the-shelf software.  In the early 1980's, we used GPSS, followed a few years later by SLAM. In the 1990's, we used Audition, a simulation package developed in part by the National Research Council of Canada. When Audition came to the end of its life a decade later -- it was incompatible with Windows 2000 and NT -- we had several large models that needed to be converted to a new simulation platform. What to do?

We started by reviewing the lessons we had learned from our previous simulation packages:

• Most of our modelling effort goes into writing custom simulation objects. With SLAM, we had a small framework that was built from its standard components and a very large body of FORTRAN code that did the real work.  SLAM did little more that manage the simulation clock and execute events.
• A non-standard programming language is a bad idea. Audition was quite an advanced programming language in its day -- basically Smalltalk with extensions to do discrete-event simulation. As good as it was, it had a small user base and lacked many basic features. We spent a huge amount of effort writing code to do things that would already be provided in a standard programming language.
• Simulation packages tend to become obsolete after ten or so years. Newer, more capable software appears on the scene and the old software becomes a legacy product that receives only token development. This is a healthy process for the simulation industry, but it leaves the model developer with a lot of software to rewrite.

As a result of this experience, we decided to adopt a mainstream object-oriented programming language and build our own simulation engine. We chose Java over C++ because it is simpler language and has a more productive programming environment. This proved to be a good decision. In eight months, we had constructed our simulation engine, written a compiler to translate Audition code into Java, and had converted and verified all our models.

Our new simulation program, the "Transportation Logistics Simulator" (TLS), was still an application-specific model for product transportation. TLS evolved with each new project and over the years acquired all the features of a modern simulation package.

JaamSim was born in 2010 when we separated TLS into a general purpose simulator and a set of application-specific components. In 2011, we released JaamSim as free, open source software and in 2013 introduced it to the simulation community with a Winter Simulation Conference paper.

JaamSim now consists of over 50,000 lines of executable code and Ohloh estimates that it represents about 13 years of effort, or about one million dollars of programmer time. It is one of the most active open-source projects that they track.

Enjoy!