simmer

by Bart Smeets (bartsmeets86@gmail.com), Iñaki Ucar (i.ucar86@gmail.com)

simmer is a Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) package for the R language designed to be a generic framework like SimPy or SimJulia. Although R alone is definitely not made for DES, we use Rcpp to boost the performance of simmer. This faces us with an important trade-off between flexibility and performance, depending on how much code remains in R or goes to C++ respectively.

Our implementation solves this problem by introducing the concept of trajectory: a common path in the simulation model for arrivals of the same type. As we will see, it is pretty flexible and simple to use, and leverages the chaining/piping workflow introduced by the magrittr package. In terms of performance, simmer is faster than SimPy when it comes to simulating queue networks.

Installation

Install the release version from CRAN:

install.packages("simmer")

The installation from GitHub requires the devtools package.

devtools::install_github("Bart6114/simmer")

Please note that the package contains some C++ code and thus you need a development environment to build the package (e.g. Rtools for Windows).

Learning simmer

To get started, please read the intro vignette:

vignette("introduction", package = "simmer")

Contact

For bugs and/or issues, create a new issue on GitHub. For other questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact us by email.