Reno vs. Crystal Ball

[Robbie]

How does Reno compare with other risk-based tools such as Crystal Ball - I'm a Weibull++, RGA and Blocksim user, however, folks in my organisiation tend to use Crystal Ball for risk type studies - are there specific advantages that Reno has over other commonly used risk tools?

Thanks

[Pantelis]

Well, let me first start by saying that my opinion is obviously biased since a lot of what went in RENO was based on my needs and specifications J…
Having said that, RENO is far more powerful and flexible. You basically create the scenario (simulation) in a flowchart and then run the scenario. RENO’s rich set of constructs basically allow you to create any simulation that you can flowchart and it includes flowchart constructs that emulate syntax found in programming environments. To be fair I must mention that this flexibility does have a slight learning curve, but if somebody is familiar with flowcharts and basic programming structure concepts I believe that they should be able to quickly come up to speed. My best recommendation is to download a copy and look at the many examples that are shipped with the application.

[Robbie]

Thanks, I've downloaded a demo now and am looking through the application examples. Seems like there is an art to it, but some complex reliability analysis we've been considering may be good candidates e.g super systems with mutiple operating conditions, subsystems, operating enviroments and differing loads (e.g. wave height) and system success criteria. In theory, (I think) I could do data analysis in Weibull+, transfer data into Blocksim for a repairable system analysis, then using a block results in Reno for a different risk perspective e.g. where there are mutlple outcomes, where some are acceptable under certain conditions and other are not?

[Pantelis]

Sounds good... and yes there is a bit of an art to doing it ... J

You are right on with the Weibull and BlockSim steps. Hopefully in the next version we are actually looking at a much tighter integration to these.

[Robbie]

A final question, I see there are logic functions in Reno, although haven't looked through a good example of application yet. Does Reno allow the user to enter conditional logic statements such as (IF x event occurs AND y event occurs simultanously, then z is the result) - which could be a production loss, or a logistic time delay, or some other undesired effect which are difficult to model using Blocksim RBDs methods. The reason I ask is that I understand that conditional logic functions have been considered for BlockSim in the future.

[Pantelis]

Yes, in several ways. First there are logical constructs… also in the functions (Build Equation …) entered at a block level there are logical statements.