A Survey of Visualization Capabilities for Simulation Environments

Simulation visualization is an effective way to understand and communicate the results of simulation studies on complex systems and processes. Among other advantages, it increases model transparency and intelligibility for all categories of users including non-experts and it can be used by modelers as a tool to debug models during development. However, simulation visualization is an uncommon subfield of research in the simulation community and, although most commercial simulation software have visualization capabilities, they are generally tightly coupled to their software. We present the results of a survey of visualization capabilities for 50 diverse simulation environments, both academic and commercial, open source and proprietary and for a variety of application domains, discussing their main advantages and gaps.