Your first Caladia plan, in fifteen minutes.
Caladia turns a block diagram of your process into a live Gantt chart, then runs Monte Carlo over it to give you P80 schedule and P80 cost. This page walks the whole loop — from opening the app to saving a .cala file you can share or re-open later.
1. What Caladia is, in one paragraph.
Caladia is a business process simulator that runs entirely in your browser. You sketch your workflow as a block diagram, give each block a duration (point estimate or distribution), assign resources and calendars, and a Gantt chart materialises beneath the canvas — complete with critical path and resource conflicts. Hit Simulate and Monte Carlo gives you percentile forecasts on both schedule and cost. Plans live as plain JSON files (.cala) on your disk. There are no accounts, no backend, and nothing leaves your machine.
2. Open the app, start from a template.
Open app.caladia.ai. On first run, the template picker opens automatically; afterwards you can re-open it from the file menu. The bundled templates each demonstrate a different modelling pattern:
- Simple Sequential Workflow — the FS-dependency basics.
- Iterative Cycle — a loop with a kickout condition.
- Software Feature Release — decision gates and parallel test/build tracks.
- Construction Project — calendars, multi-resource activities, fixed costs.
- Marketing Campaign, Clinical Trial / R&D, Event Launch — domain-flavoured starting points.
For this walkthrough, the Software Feature Release template is a good fit — it exercises every tab. Pick it and the canvas fills with a worked example.
3. A tour of the five tabs.
Caladia’s top bar has five tabs. The canvas is where you build the plan; the other four are different views on the consequences.
1 Canvas
The whiteboard. Drag activity blocks, decision diamonds, and start/end nodes. Connect them with FS, SS, FF, or SF dependencies and an optional signed lag. Multi-select, copy/paste, undo. Wrap a selection into a loop for iterative work, or a sub-system to collapse complexity behind a single block.
2 Gantt
The deterministic schedule, auto-updated on every canvas edit. Bars on the critical path are coloured; non-working days are shaded; dependency arrows follow your edges. Loops collapse into a single iteration group you can expand.
3 Resources
Resource pools, their calendars, and a per-resource utilisation chart that surfaces over-allocation. Each assignment has a conflict policy that decides what happens when the resource’s calendar disagrees with the activity’s — intersection, resource-wins, or activity-wins. Set per assignment.
4 Simulate
Set the iteration count and a seed, hit run. The verdict bar at the top shows P50, P80, and P95 for both schedule and cost. Below it: cumulative S-curves for finish date and project cost, a histogram with percentile markers, and a target-date slider that tells you the probability of hitting any specific deadline. Seeded runs are reproducible — re-running with the same seed gives the same answer.
5 Risks
Where a Monte Carlo run gets dissected. Tornado charts rank activities by schedule risk and, separately, by cost risk. Criticality index per node shows how often each activity sat on the critical path across all iterations.
4. Run your first simulation.
Switch to the Simulate tab and click Run. The default iteration count (typically 10,000) is plenty for most plans. After a second or two, the verdict bar populates.
Three numbers do most of the work:
- P50 — the median. Half of simulated runs finish on or before this date / cost.
- P80 — the planning number. There’s an 80% chance you finish on or before this. Commit to this, not P50.
- P95 — the pessimistic edge. Useful for stress tests and as the upper bound on contingency.
The gap between P50 and P80 is your uncertainty. A tight gap means the plan is well-constrained; a wide gap is the cost of optimism. If P80 looks scary, flip to the Risks tab and read the schedule tornado — the top one or two bars are usually where the uncertainty is hiding.
5. Save, share, re-open.
Save downloads a .cala file to your machine. That file is the entire project — canvas, durations, distributions, resources, calendars, simulation history — as plain JSON.
To re-open, drag the file onto the Caladia app or use the file menu.
To share a snapshot with someone who doesn’t use Caladia, export a static HTML page from the share menu. The export is a self-contained .html file with the canvas image, the Gantt, the verdict bar, and the embedded plan JSON. It opens in any browser; the recipient can view but not edit.