Idea

FlexSim's dashboards offer several built in graph types to easily visualize your data, including dot plots, line charts, bar charts, pie charts, and histograms. Those chart types cover the basics, but don't come close to scratching the surface of all possible chart types.

A Sankey Diagram is just one of an infinite number of ways to display your data. FlexSim couldn't possibly program every single possible custom graph type to satisfy the universe of needs that our customers may have.

Luckily, FlexSim excels not only as a simulation software, but is a pretty good development platform in its own right. FlexSim has all the built in flexibility to allow the enterprising user to do just about anything.

One of our worst kept secrets is that FlexSim includes a fully fledged web renderer that we use to display various aspects of FlexSim, including dashboards, the user manual, the start page, and more. The great thing about having a web renderer is that anything that you can see on a webpage could be incorporated into FlexSim.

As @michael.machado mentioned, I did a video series several years ago showing how a Sankey Diagram could be incorporated into a FlexSim model. It is not very polished, not scripted, quite long (almost 2 hours altogether), and you have to be comfortable not only with FlexSim, but also with web technologies. This isn't really mass market kind of material.

That said, this old video series shows the framework that could be followed to incorporate any sort of data visualization into your FlexSim simulation model. I'm sure this thrown-together example could be polished by someone who has actually learned the D3 javascript library and would be able to streamline this example and optimize communication between FlexSim and the diagram.

If you find that you need data visualization but don't feel comfortable doing a custom graph on your own, feel free to contact our services group. This is definitely a service you can purchase from us.

At any rate, here are the 5 videos. They are a bit old (but not out-of-date). They are long. They are by no means 'basic'. You have been warned :)

• https://vimeo.com/171769504
• https://vimeo.com/171769896
• https://vimeo.com/171770056
• https://vimeo.com/171770159
• https://vimeo.com/171770226

This feature is now available in the 18.2 beta

You could use the Module SDK (found here) to accomplish this task. You can use the Mesh class to create a custom 3D-drawable object, that changes shape as the model runs.

Once you clone the repository linked above, you can read the included documentation on how to develop a module. If you make this as a module, it will be easily shareable. In addition, you will be able to use Visual Studio's intellisense and autocomplete features.