Arrival defined by a fixed value - AnyLogic - simulation

So Im trying to determine whether another vending machine is required in the gas station (it's an exercise not a real life problem). The only thing that Im given is the fact that each minute a customer is trying to use the vending machine and on average it takes 0.95 min for a customer to buy and pay for what he bought. Im having trouble with "arrivals defined by" field. The exercise says that I absolutely must use interarrival rate. It also says that the probability distribution is unknown and that it is most definitely not exponential. My question is the following, is there any way to define interarrival rate without using a distribution function. I tried inputing the number on it's own and the simulation doesn't work. I considered using rate even though Im not suppose to but it just didn't make sense since rate already considers the distribution to be exponential which isn't the case in my simulation.

Based on your requirement I absolutely must use interarrival rate I understand that you need to use an interarrival time, but not necessarily exponential. In this case you can choose any other distribution from a list of distributions (See below).
If you want those arrivals to be uniformly distributed, use the uniform distribution.
Or if you want them to arrive exactly every 5 minutes, create a bulk of the agents, delay them for 5 minutes and let them in to the system.

Related

Anylogic - Substantial variances in identical arrival rate schedule outputs

I am currently completing some verification checks on an Anylogic DES simulation model, and I have two source blocks with identical hourly arrival rate schedules, broken down into 24 x 1h blocks.
The issue I am encountering is significant differences in the number of agents generated by one block compared with another. I understand that the arrival rate is based on the poisson distribution, so there is some level of randomness in the instants of agent generation, but I would expect that the overall number generated by these two blocks should be similar, if not identical. For example, in one operating scenario one block is generating 78 agents, whilst the other is only generating 67 over the 24h period. This seems to be a common issue across all operating scenarios.
Is there a potential explanation regarding idiosyncrasies within Anylogic that might explain this?
Any pointers would be welcomed.
I think it occurs because it follows a poisson distribution. To solve this, you could use the interarrival time function of the source block. In that case you would have the same number of arrivals for different source blocks. However, I'm not sure whether this fits a schedule. If not, you could use the getHourOfDay() function together with a parameter representing the interarrival time. You then have to write the code below for every hour of the day:
if(getHourOfDay()==14) parameter =5;
using sources with poisson distributions will definitely not produce same results... That's the magic of stocastic models.
An alternative to solve this problem is the following:
sources will generate using the inject function
use dynamic events that will be in charge to do source.inject();
let's imagine you have R trains coming per day, and this is a fixed value you want to use, you can then distribute the trains accross the day by doing this:
for(int i=0;i<R;i++){
create_DynamicEvent1(uniform(0,1),DAY); //for source1
create_DynamicEvent2(uniform(0,1),DAY); //for source2
}
This doesn't follow a poisson distribution, but generates a predefined number of arrivals of trains throughout the day, and you can use another distribution of your choice if the uniform is not good enough for you.
run this for every day

Machine Learning to predict time-series multi-class signal changes

I would like to predict the switching behavior of time-dependent signals. Currently the signal has 3 states (1, 2, 3), but it could be that this will change in the future. For the moment, however, it is absolutely okay to assume three states.
I can make the following assumptions about these states (see picture):
the signals repeat periodically, possibly with variations concerning the time of day.
the duration of state 2 is always constant and relatively short for all signals.
the duration of states 1 and 3 are also constant, but vary for the different signals.
the switching sequence is always the same: 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> 2 --> 1 --> [...]
there is a constant but unknown time reference between the different signals.
There is no constant time reference between my observations for the different signals. They are simply measured one after the other, but always at different times.
I am able to rebuild my model periodically after i obtained more samples.
I have the following problems:
I can only observe one signal at a time.
I can only observe the signals at different times.
I cannot trigger my measurement with the state transition. That means, when I measure, I am always "in the middle" of a state. Therefore I don't know when this state has started and also not exactly when this state will end.
I cannot observe a certain signal for a long duration. So, i am not able to observe a complete period.
My samples (observations) are widespread in time.
I would like to get a prediction either for the state change or the current state for the current time. It is likely to happen that i will never have measured my signals for that requested time.
So far I have tested the TimeSeriesPredictor from the ML.NET Toolbox, as it seemed suitable to me. However, in my opinion, this algorithm requires that you always pass only the data of one signal. This means that assumption 5 is not included in the prediction, which is probably suboptimal. Also, in this case I had problems with the prediction not changing, which should actually happen time-dependently when I query multiple predictions. This behavior led me to believe that only the order of the values entered the model, but not the associated timestamp. If I have understood everything correctly, then exactly this timestamp is my most important "feature"...
So far, i did not do any tests on Regression-based approaches, e.g. FastTree, since my data is not linear, but keeps changing states. Maybe this assumption is not valid and regression-based methods could also be suitable?
I also don't know if a multiclassifier is required, because I had understood that the TimeSeriesPredictor would also be suitable for this, since it works with the single data type. Whether the prediction is 1.3 or exactly 1.0 would be fine for me.
To sum it up:
I am looking for a algorithm which is able to recognize the switching patterns based on lose and widespread samples. It would be okay to define boundaries, e.g. state duration 3 of signal 1 will never last longer than 30s or state duration 1 of signal 3 will never last longer 60s.
Then, after the algorithm has obtained an approximate model of the switching behaviour, i would like to request a prediction of a certain signal state for a certain time.
Which methods can I use to get the best prediction, preferably using the ML.NET toolbox or based on matlab?
Not sure if this is quite what you're looking for, but if detecting spikes and changes using signals is what you're looking for, check out the anomaly detection algorithms in ML.NET. Here are two tutorials that show how to use them.
Detect anomalies in product sales
Spike detection
Change point detection
Detect anomalies in time series
Detect anomaly period
Detect anomaly
One way to approach this would be to first determine the periodicity of each of the signals independently. This could be done by looking at the frequency distribution of time differences between measurements of state 2 only and separately for each signal.
This will give a multinomial distribution. The shortest time difference will be the duration of the switching event (after discarding time differences less than the max duration of state 2). The second shortest peak will be the duration between the end of one switching event and the start of the next.
When you have the 3 calculations of periodicity you can simply calculate the difference between each of them. Given you have the timestamps of the measurements of state 2 for each signal you should be able to calculate the time of switching for all other signals.

Get the same arrival rate across models

I have a model that I have duplicated and made some adjustments to it. When I run both models with the same fixed seed I don’t get the same results, which I understand because I have other sources of randomness in the model. Regardless, in both models, I am using a source block, such that the arrivals are defined by a rate schedule, the schedule is of type rate, and is provided from the database. Now, I know the following pieces of information:
Generally, I can use my own random number generator (RNG) in distributions, for example triangular(5, 10, 25, myRNG), such that Random myRNG = new Random (2)
By default, a schedule with “type” rate follows a passion distribution that utilizes the default RNG.
At anytime in the model, I can substitute the default RNG with my own by calling setDefaultRandomGenerator(Random r).
The question is: Is it possible to use a fixed seed for the arrival rate to make sure I am getting the same exact input in both models?
In anylogic, rates are always equivalent to a poisson distribution with lambda equal to the rate you set,
Intearrival times don't follow any distribution, but using exponential(lambda) in the field is equivalent to using a arrival by rate with a rate of lambda.
But poisson and exponential are closely related, which is why if you use poisson(1.0/lambda) in the intearrival time, you have the same average arrivals as if you use exponential(lambda).
It is not possible to set a seed for the arrival rate, and that's why you need to use intearrival times instead in your source
But you need to create a variable first, let's call it rand, of type Random with initial value new Random(seed)
where seed is any integer you want (long to be more exact)
then in the intearrival time you need to do:
exponential(lambda, 0,rand)
This will lead to unique simulation runs, no matter what configuration you have in the AnyLogic experiment
Sure, simply set both Source blocks to "Interarrival time" in the "arrivals defined by".
Then, use the same code poisson(1, myRNG) in the field, making sure that the myRNG RNG uses the same initial seed (i.e.new Random(1234)
(the "Rate" setting is the same as using poission(1) for interarrival-time)

Alert in RAM/CPU Usage Detection in e-Commerce Server

Currently I'm building my monitoring services for my e-commerce Server, which mostly focus on CPU/RAM usage. It's likely Anomaly Detection on Timeseries data.
My approach is building LSTM Neural Network to predict next CPU/RAM value on chart trending and compare with STD (standard deviation) value multiply with some number (currently is 10)
But in real life conditions, it depends on many differents conditions, such as:
1- Maintainance Time (in this time "anomaly" is not "anomaly")
2- Sales time in day-off events, holidays, etc., RAM/CPU usages increase is normal, of courses
3- If percentages of CPU/RAM decrement are the same over 3 observations: 5 mins, 10 mins & 15 mins -> Anomaly. But if 5 mins decreased 50%, but 10 mins it didn't decrease too much (-5% ~ +5%) -> Not an "anomaly".
Currently I detect anomaly on formular likes this:
isAlert = (Diff5m >= 10 && Diff10m >= 15 && Diff30m >= 40)
where Diff is Different Percentage in Absolute value.
Unfortunately I don't save my "pure" data for building neural network, for example, when it detects anomaly, I modified that it is not an anomaly anymore.
I would like to add some attributes to my input for model, such as isMaintenance, isPromotion, isHoliday, etc. but sometimes it leads to overfitting.
I also want to my NN can adjust baseline over the time, for example, when my Service is more popular, etc.
There are any hints on these aims?
Thanks
I would say that an anomaly is an unusual outcome, i.e. a outcome that's not expected given the inputs. As you've figured out, there are a few variables that are expected to influence CPU and RAM usage. So why not feed those to the network? That's the whole point of Machine Learning. Your network will make a prediction of CPU usage, taking into account the sales volume, whether there is (or was) a maintenance window, etc.
Note that you probably don't need an isPromotion input if you include actual sales volumes. The former is a discrete input, and only captures a fraction of the information present in the totalSales input
Machine Learning definitely needs data. If you threw that away, you'll have to restart capturing it. As for adjusting the baseline, you can achieve that by overweighting recent input data.

Simulation: send packets according to exponential distribution

I am trying to build a network simulation (aloha like) where n nodes decide at any instant whether they have to send or not according to an exponential distribution (exponentially distributed arrival times).
What I have done so far is: I set a master clock in a for loop which ticks and any node will start sending at this instant (tick) only if a sample I draw from a uniform [0,1] for this instant is greater than 0.99999; i.e. at any time instant a node has 0.00001 probability of sending (very close to zero as the exponential distribution requires).
Can these arrival times be considered exponentially distributed at each node and if yes with what parameter?
What you're doing is called a time-step simulation, and can be terribly inefficient. Each tick in your master clock for loop represents a delta-t increment in time, and in each tick you have a laundry list of "did this happen?" possible updates. The larger the time ticks are, the lower the resolution of your model will be. Small time ticks will give better resolution, but really bog down the execution.
To answer your direct questions, you're actually generating a geometric distribution. That will provide a discrete time approximation to the exponential distribution. The expected value of a geometric (in terms of number of ticks) is 1/p, while the expected value of an exponential with rate lambda is 1/lambda, so effectively p corresponds to the exponential's rate per whatever unit of time a tick corresponds to. For instance, with your stated value p = 0.00001, if a tick is a millisecond then you're approximating an exponential with a rate of 1 occurrence per 100 seconds, or a mean of 100 seconds between occurrences.
You'd probably do much better to adopt a discrete-event modeling viewpoint. If the time between network sends follows the exponential distribution, once a send event occurs you can schedule when the next one will occur. You maintain a priority queue of pending events, and after handling the logic of the current event you poll the priority queue to see what happens next. Pull the event notice off the queue, update the simulation clock to the time of that event, and dispatch control to a method/function corresponding to the state update logic of that event. Since nothing happens between events, you can skip over large swatches of time. That makes the discrete-event paradigm much more efficient than the time step approach unless the model state needs updating in pretty much every time step. If you want more information about how to implement such models, check out this tutorial paper.