Simulation Studio templates provide a facility for managing the blocks you use to build your simulation models, and the Simulation Studio template palette offers a visual representation of template content. A Simulation Studio template contains information about a collection of blocks. This information is stored as an XML document. There is no limit on the number of templates you can load into Simulation Studio. The content of any loaded template can be viewed in the Template Palette area of the application. As discussed in Chapter 4: Simulation Models, you drag an item from the Simulation Studio palette into a Model window to create an instance of the associated block in your simulation model.

When Simulation Studio starts, it automatically loads a series of default templates named Standard, Advanced, Data and Display, Resource, and Output Analysis. These templates provide collections of blocks useful for building queuing simulation models. These blocks include Entity Generators, Queues, Servers, and so on; they are described in detail in Appendix A: Templates. These collections of blocks will continue to evolve in succeeding Simulation Studio releases.

You can also create a custom template and save it to a data file for later use either by using selections described in Using the Template Palette Pop-up Menu to modify an existing template or by creating a template XML document as described in Template Document Format.

Although there are no constraints on the contents of a template (other than the element format described in Template Document Format), you usually create a collection of blocks that have some theme in common. For example, you might create a template with blocks for simulating a manufacturing environment, or you might create a template with blocks specifically designed to address health care services simulation.