May 2006

Palisade Featured in Quality Digest
Highlighting the growing popularity of Palisade tools in the quality control community, trade leader Quality Digest recently published the article, Neural Networks Software Crunches the Big Numbers by Palisade’s Miroslaw Janusz, Ph.D. The article highlights NeuralTools, Palisade’s new Neural Networks software, and explains why neural networks are particularly well adapted at addressing problems with quality control and industrial processing. Offering the reader a guided tour of how “neurons” and networks function, Dr. Janusz demonstrates the wide range of complex phenomena that NeuralTools can be used to predict—from snack food flavour to energy prices to the cost of capital.

:: Sophisticated Weaponry
NeuralTools is the latest arrow in Palisade’s quiver of quality control tools. @RISK and the DecisionTools Suite have proved themselves in developing Six Sigma programs and training staff in techniques to carry out those programs, as well as production floor quality. Two notable examples are Cummins’s Six Sigma program, which relies on @RISK, and Met-Mex Peñoles use of the DecisionTools Suite to control waste of silver and gold in its refining of precious metals. Today’s quality control programs also rely heavily on statistics, and StatTools offers companies easy ways to train employees in statistics and data analysis, and to integrate their analyses in simulation and Neural Networks predictions.

:: Common Denominator: Ease of Use
What do all these tools have in common that appeals to the folks in quality control? Intuitive ease of use. The quantitative techniques required for Six Sigma and other quality control programs can be daunting. But as Cummins’s Ernest Lifferth points out, “We aren’t necessarily interested in turning our engineers into statisticians, but we are interested in enabling engineers to use statistics—and @RISK is a great tool for this.” Palisade’s interfaces with the familiar Excel environment, the easy integration of information from one tool to another, and the graphic reports shorten the learning curve for new quality control initiates and simplify communicating results.

read the full article Neural Networks Software Crunches the Big Numbers
read Cummins, Inc. case study
read Met-Mex Peñoles case study

 

Industry Application:
DecisionTools and the Environment
Nature confronts environmentalists and scientists with bottomless complexity. Even seemingly discreet factors such as air temperatures, water levels, and plant and animal populations are in themselves a tangle of interdependent variables. This multilayered entanglement makes environmental issues perfect subjects for Palisade’s DecisionTools Suite. An increasing number of customers use Palisade tools to measure and predict factors that influence the environment.

@RISK and its companion tools have modeled responses to a range of problems where the unknowns themselves had to be simulated. For instance, a team of scientists working for Kennecott Utah Copper used @RISK and BestFit to estimate the effect of the mining company’s operations on wetland birds, and their study prompted corrective actions by Kennecott. And in a series of workshops around the world, the IUNC-World Conservation Union pairs PrecisionTree with @RISK to teach scientists working on populations of endangered animals how to identify and analyse the risks of disease for those populations.

But it’s not only wild animals benefiting from the DecisionTools Suite. At Cornell University, engineers created an @RISK model of optimal management of water supply in arid central Texas that depends on the Lower Colorado River. @RISK and PrecisionTree have even been used to assess the potential impact of a volcano eruption on human villages on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

In contrast to decision-makers in business and engineering, who often analyse scenarios with mountains of information, Palisade users who work on ecological issues are implementing DecisionTools to compensate for lack of information. For example, there is a lack of solid data on the diseases that occur naturally in wild populations. In another case, the impact of selenium pollution on native species was completely without precedent. As World Conservation Union workshop organizer Douglas Armstrong reported, “What we needed was a set of practical, comprehensive, broadly applicable tools to anticipate what the problems might be. I think we have that now.”

read environmental case studies
learn more about DecisionTools Suite

 

Product Spotlight:
@RISK Developer’s Kit
For many users the spreadsheet is the preferred risk modelling environment. However, many times an application written in a standard programming language needs Monte Carlo simulation or distribution fitting capabilities. You may need to work outside the spreadsheet environment, in an application with its own user interface, variables and model calculations. In addition, a developer may want to allow users to access the application over a corporate network or over the Internet.

The @RISK Developer’s Kit (RDK) allows custom applications such as these to run simulations and generate result graphs and statistics. You can access all the features, calculations, and reporting of @RISK for Excel using the RDK. Applications written with the RDK will often run faster and can contain larger numbers of distributions and outputs when compared with models written in spreadsheet versions of @RISK. This is because RDK applications are compiled and do not contain additional routines executed during spreadsheet recalculation.

:: Distribute Custom Solutions Over the Web
The RDK allows you to streamline the distribution of your risk analysis solutions through enterprise-wide web deployment. Server-based risk analysis models – such as corporate financial models, engineering applications, and financial planning tools – can be accessed over the Internet from any browser, allowing users to enter model parameters and inputs, run simulations, and view results and graphs. Model structure, logic, and RDK simulation libraries are stored on the server, ensuring consistency for all end-users and removing local installation and support issues.

learn more about @RISK Developer's Kit

 

@RISK Italiano Released continued from above

:: Same Great Product
The new version contains all the same capabilities and power of the original @RISK. Palisade’s translation of the English-language software is comprehensive, with @RISK menus, commands, help files, and software manual all carefully rendered in Italian.

:: Italian Joins a Growing Family
The Italian version of @RISK joins an international family of Spanish, French, German, and Japanese translations of the product, released last year. As with the other languages, the Italian version is supported by web pages, brochures, and example files in Italian. Existing @RISK users who wish to add the Italian version may contact their regional sales representative for a special introductory offer.

:: “Upsurge in Demand”
Craig Ferri, Managing Director of Palisade Europe said, “Organizations are becoming much more aware of the impact of everyday threats to their business, and are turning to tools such as @RISK to provide them with the data they need to make critical business decisions. Subsequently we have seen an upsurge in demand for our products across Europe, and the Italian version is the latest in our response to this demand.”

read the press release
learn more about @RISK in Italiano

Ask Amy continued from above

The height of a bar in a relative frequency histogram gives you the probability for the interval.

The advantage of Relative Frequency histograms is that you can tell at a glance the probability of each bin. Relative Frequency histograms are most appropriate when all bin widths are equal, since unequal bin widths can result in a visually misleading graph.

Probability Density histograms, on the other hand, are created by:

• Dividing the data into intervals.
• Calculating the fraction of data values in each interval.
• Dividing these fractions by the size of each interval.

The area of a bar in a probability density histogram gives you the proportion of the total that falls in the designated region. The sum of the area of all of the bars is equal to one. Probability Density histograms are useful when comparing data from theoretical distributions to simulated results.

@RISK easily lets you choose the type of histogram you want. To do this:

• Right-click on your histogram and select "Format Graph" from the menu.
• Select the "Type" tab.
• In the "Histogram Options" section, click on the drop down arrow
  next to the "Format" field to choose Density or Relative Frequency.
• Click "OK".

KnowledgeBase articles about Palisade Software

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