STEM Quick Start

When you first start STEM it will display either the Designer perspective or the Simulation perspective. Both contain the Scenarios view. This view contains a hierarchical display of the Scenarios that are built in to STEM and are ready to start a Simulation. See Figures 1 and 2 below.

In either perspective, expand the tree displayed in the Scenarios view to display the available Scenarios. Select one of the displayed Scenarios by "double-clicking" on its title, Figure 3.

STEM will immediately switch to the Simulation perspective, if it is not already displaying it, and begin reading in the data that defines the Simulation. It's progress is displayed at the bottom of the window. The amount of time it takes to read in the data for the Simulation will depend upon the size of the model and the characteristics of the host computer. On a fast computer with more than 2 gigabytes of RAM and fast disks the Scenario illustrated in Figure 4, below, will load and began execution in less than 30 seconds. On a smaller slower machine (e.g., a small laptop with slow disks), this could take several minutes).

Note that the Simulation will begin execution before the Map view will show any activity. This is because the Map view doesn't begin reading the "map data" until it is known which geographic areas are involved in the Simulation, which isn't known until the Simulation is completely loaded and running. This isn't generally a problem as the Simulation can be "reset" and re-started with the two in sync.

In Figure 5, below, various features of the display of a running Simulation are highlighted. The "Map display control" is used to control which features of the Simulation are displayed in the Scenario , from Algeria.