About

Who is behind salabim?

Ruud van der Ham is the core developer of salabim. He has a long history in simulation, both in applications and tool building.

It all started in the mid 70’s modeling container terminals in Prosim, a package in PL/1 that was inspired by Simula and run on big IBM 360/370 mainframes.

In the eighties, Prosim was ported to smaller computers, but at the same time he developed a discrete event simulation tool called Must to run on CP/M machines, later on MSDOS machines, again under PL/1. A bit later, Must was ported to Pascal and was used in many projects. Must was never ported to Windows. Instead, Hans Veeke (Delft University) came with Tomas, a package that is still available and runs under Delphi.

End 2016, an easy to use and open source package for a project, preferably in Python, was wanted. Unfortunately, the other Python DES package Simpy (particularly version 3) does not support the essential process interaction methods activate, hold, passivate and standby. First he tried to build a wrapper around Simpy 3, but that didn’t work too well.

That was the start of a new package, called salabim. One of the key features of salabim is the powerful animation engine that is heavily inspired by some of his creative projects where every animation object can change position, shape, colour, orientation over time.

Then, gradually, a lot of functionality was added as well bugs were fixed. Also, the package became available on PyPI and GitHub and the documentation was made available.

Large parts of salabim were actually developed on an iPad on the excellent Pythonista platform. Pratically the full functionality is thus available under iOS as well.

Why is the package called salabim?

The name is derived from the magic words Sim Salabim, where Sim is actually short for simulation !

Note that the name should be written in all lowercase, unless it is at the start of a sentence, like a normal noun.

Contributing and reporting issues

It is very much appreciated to contribute to the salabim, by issuing a pull request or issue on GitHub.

Alternatively, the Google group can be used for this.

Support

Ruud van der Ham is able and willing to help users with issues with the package and modelling in general.

He is also available for code and model reviews, consultancy, training.

Contact him or other users via the Google group or ruud@salabim.org.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to who the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.