Dynamically adding model presentations to make navigation during editing faster in AnyLogic.

This special guest blog post by intern Devon Cowling. He is currently doing his final year project for his degree in Industrial Engineering at the University of Pretoria under the supervision of Jaco-Ben Vosloo. This will be a short post on improving the navigation speed of AnyLogic when dealing with large and complex agent presentations. Due to the way these animations and presentations work in AnyLogic, they can use many resources.

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It can be nothing less than aggravating for anyone who has dealt with crippling performance loss during model development when dealing with large agent presentations. At first glance, it seems easy enough just to delete the presentation while working on the model and manually re-add it before runtime. This works fine and will improve navigation speed but is quite cumbersome and tedious. This approach requires you to repeat this every time you work on the animation agent, and if you're like me and forget to delete it from the project taskbar before opening the agent, you get a nasty surprise as your computer time travels back to dial-up speeds.

I have created an example model with a large road network, borrowed from my final year project. The large road network is housed in an agent called AgentWithIntenseAnimation, and needs to be seen on Main during runtime.

Check out how slow the movement of the AnyLogic canvas is in the video below while the presentation is shown.

If you almost felt like pulling your hair out during the video, imagine how I felt working on this project for weeks...

Thankfully there is an easy method to fix this, add the presentation dynamically!

This speeds up the navigation while maintaining the presentation's functionality and animation at runtime. And the best part... it only needs to be done once!

Using the code below code on start-up of the top-level agent will add the presentation:

presentation.add(new ShapeEmbeddedObjectPresentation​(Agent agent,
                                       ShapeDrawMode drawMode,
                                       boolean ispublic,
                                       double x,
                                       double y,
                                       double z,
                                       double rotation,
                                       boolean drawAgentWithOffset,
                                       boolean scaleIsAutomatic,
                                       Agent embeddedObject));

For the example model I've created, the code above would look like this:

presentation.add(new ShapeEmbeddedObjectPresentation(this,
                                     ShapeDrawMode.SHAPE_DRAW_2D3D,
                                       true,
                                       0,
                                       0,
                                       0,
                                       0,
                                       false,
                                       false,
                                       AgentWithIntenseAnimation));

Using the above technique the result was as follows:

As you can see, adding the presentation dynamically makes navigation much smoother and working on that agent easier, whether that be to add statistics or buttons etc.

This method has made working on a model with a large presentation much more user-friendly (and literally saved me from pulling my hair out), so I hope it can be helpful to anyone who has struggled with slow navigation in AnyLogic.

You can download the example model from the AnyLogic cloud here, or the link below

DynamicPresentaion

.zip

Download ZIP • 274KB

Once you've had first-hand experience with the difference in navigation speed, you will want to make every presentation dynamic!

P.S. A big thank you to AnyLogic support for assisting in finding this solution

Devon Cowling

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Devon Cowling is a guest writer for the AnyLogic Modeler. Feel free to connect with him over LinkedIn.

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