What is Plant Simulation?
Plant Simulation, also known by its full name Tecnomatix Plant Simulation is a product lifecycle management software developed by Siemens Digital Industries Software. It is a versatile, industry-agnostic application. As a result, it is used by all kinds of business customers: from service providers to factories, logistics companies, and airports. The software allows its users to run in-depth simulations of their production chains, accounting for many factors such as irregular shipments and machine failure. These simulations are useful for many reasons; they allow businesses to optimize their production, increasing performance and/or decreasing costs. Although the experts can learn a lot from the simulations alone, Plant Simulation offers many analytical tools to simplify and partially automate this work. To give an example, the software is capable of finding bottlenecks in production, utilizing the Bottleneck Analyzer tool. Alongside these specialized tools, Plant Simulation also offers optimization tools that are more broad in scope: genetic algorithms, neural networks, and regression analysis. The software is developed exclusively for Microsoft Windows. Nonetheless, it is also possible to run Plant Simulation on Mac. Several different third-party tools can be used for this purpose; read the article below for the overview.
Why doesn’t Plant Simulation run on Mac?
There are several reasons why some apps don’t run on Mac. It could be an incompatibility with Mac hardware or macOS version. Also, macOS Catalina and Big Sur don’t support 32-bit apps. Most developers are designing new, 64-bit versions of the apps, but there are still hundreds of apps that can only run on 32-bit Macs. In our case, the reason is that Plant Simulation native Macintosh version simply doesn’t exist. At the present moment, there is no information about the release date and the possibility that Plant Simulation will be available for Mac.
How to run Plant Simulation on Mac
The most popular solution for running Plant Simulation on Mac/MacBook is virtualization software. Despite the fact that emulators usually demand quite a lot of computing power out of a Mac, some of them, for example, Parallels, VirtualBox, or VMWare, can be used to run different programs on OS X with minimal losses in performance. Moreover, some of them are compatible with DirectX 11, which can help with running graphically demanding apps and games. Also, you can change desktops and copy any files between your Parallels program (Windows Desktop) and OS X freely.
Running Plant Simulation through Parallels
If you wish to run Plant Simulation on Mac, Parallels Desktop can be a solution. This is an application that allows for Windows virtualization on Mac with the full support of DirectX and GPUs. In simpler terms, what this means is that it allows you to install Windows 10 on Mac with just a couple of clicks and switch between MacOS and Windows instantly. So you will be able to run Windows and install Plant Simulation just like on a regular PC.
Running Plant Simulation through other virtual machines
Another popular virtualization program is VMware Fusion. It is a software hypervisor that allows running virtual machines like guest operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Fusion’s current versions provide hardware-accelerated DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 capabilities to virtual machines, which allows them to run heavy, GPU-intensive applications and games with top 3D graphics.
You can also try VirtualBox, Wine, and QEMU, however, these solutions are not user-oriented and may require advanced computer skills.
Running Plant Simulation on remote server
If you have a powerful Windows-based server and a fast internet connection, another method is Plant Simulation running on Windows on a Server machine (in the cloud, or remote desktop) and looking at the screen from your Mac.
You can use TeamViewer, AnyDesk, or other software for this purpose.
Running Plant Simulation on Windows 10 using Boot Camp
Note: Mac M1 chipsets are not supported by BootCamp
BootCamp allows users to choose the system to work in on startup, however, you won’t be able to switch between systems like in Parallels. Do note that you will need no less than 64 GB of free space on your device (we recommend having 128 GB). After Windows installation completes, your Mac starts up in Windows and opens a ”Welcome to the Boot Camp installer” Window. You will need to reboot your machine every time you want to switch from Mac to Windows and vice versa. To set up Windows via BootCamp, please, do the following:
For OS X El Capitan 10.11 and older
Important: for MacOS versions prior to OS X El Capitan 10.11 you will need to create bootable Windows USB.
- Download Windows ISO file
- Open Boot Camp Assistant (Go to Applications > Utilities)
- Define the Windows partition size choose downloaded Windows ISO file
- Format Windows partition and go through all Windows installation steps
- When Windows boots for the first time follow on-screen instructions to install Boot Camp and Windows support software (drivers)