Summary: “After some research SIAS selected RLM as the supplier of the next licensing solution. RLM offered all the flexibility needed to cope with our unique licensing model. The test code supplied in the RLM kit was tried on a network spanning multiple time zones and successfully checked out and checked back in some 10,000 licences. RLM support was also a great help in integrating their libraries into our mix of programming environments.”

About SIAS Limited:

S-Paramics and RLM licensing

S-Paramics, from SIAS Limited in Scotland, UK, is a road traffic microsimulation software suite.  It assists city planners and transport planners in assessing the impact of the changes to the flow of traffic. A model of the road network is built and calibrated using surveyed data on journeys and traffic flows. Then changes are made to the model such as new roads, new traffic control systems or additional road trips, perhaps from a new retail development. S-Paramics simulates every individual car, truck and bus on the road network in both versions of the model.

The major software module in S-Paramics is the modeller, which edits road network models, simulates the vehicles and provides a visualisation of the moving traffic. There is a separate batch mode of the modeller which performs the simulation only. The Data Analysis Tool then takes the results of the simulations and identifies the changes in speed and flows as well as quantifying the benefits of the road network changes.

Licensing Models
Licensing S-Paramics is quite complex.  The three main modules are individually licensed.  For example a customer may have more batch mode licences than desktop modeller licences and will use them to operate a grid computing batch farm.  S-Paramics is licensed according to the size of the simulation model, measured by the number of vehicles present in it, so some details of function and model size must be encoded in a licence. Most customers also have time limited licences which require renewal annually and hence there is an expiry date in the licence. Finally, many customers continue to use old versions of S-Paramics, preferring to keep the number of variables to a minimum when comparing new road designs with runs from previous base models.

RLM replaces problematic dongles
Two different dongles have been used in the past. The first was a serial port dongle (pre-USB and it had to work on Unix, Linux and Windows).  This was replaced because the failure rate approached 40%. The next dongle, a USB key, works fine when licensing individual PCs but the network dongle proved troublesome when communicating over corporate networks spanning several timezones. The latest release of the dongle management software also saw the dongle manufacturer taking more control of the configuration process making it hard to integrate into SIAS’s own procedures. For SIAS to continue to offer licences for older S-Paramics releases while using the new dongle security we would have had to duplicate the licence data and in effect double the number of licences available from each dongle.

Why RLM?
After some research SIAS selected RLM as the supplier of the next licensing solution. RLM offered all the flexibility needed to cope with our unique licensing model. The test code supplied in the RLM kit was tried on a network spanning multiple time zones and successfully checked out and checked back in some 10,000 licences. RLM support was also a great help in integrating their libraries into our mix of programming environments.

https://www.paramics.co.uk