Forty years of discrete-event simulation—a personal reflection

Hollocks, Brian

doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602128

Cited by 72 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…The review discusses significant developments that occurred during this history and questions the need of following developments in computing without significant developments in simulation modelling methodology. An alternative historical review is by Hollocks (2006) who gives a personal account of the history and evolution of simulation modelling with a particular interest in software development up to 1992. He extrapolates from that history to comment on the continuing evolution of simulation modelling and its software.…”

Section: Studies Of Simulation Modelling Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation modelling is 50! Do we need a reality check?

Taylor

Eldabi

Riley

et al. 2009

Journal of the Operational Research Society

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Simulation modelling is a fascinating research field. The techniques and tools of simulation modelling have been used to research and investigate the behaviour of various systems in a wide range of areas such as commerce, computer networks, defence, health, manufacturing and transportation. Indeed, the study of the use of these techniques and tools, and the development of new forms of these, are a rich source of research in their own right. Simulation modelling is about to reach the 50th anniversary of the development of GSP (General Simulation Program), the first simulation modelling language (Tocher and Owen, 1960). There have been several historical accounts of simulation modelling research. To complement these, we have performed a review of the recent history of simulation modelling. This study targeted three leading journals dedicated to this field. These are the ACM Transactions of Modeling and Computer Simulation, Simulation: Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International and Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory (formerly Simulation Practice and Theory). The study covered the first 6 years of this century (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005) and included 576 papers. The key observation of this work was the relative lack of 'real world' involvement in simulation modelling research and an even greater lack of evidence of 'real world' benefit, arguably very alarming outcomes for an applied field. To further investigate this observation two additional surveys were carried out, one to study if real world papers appeared in the more widely known OR/MS literature (837 papers in 12 journals) and one to study if such papers appeared in Manufacturing and Logistics, an application area closely associated with simulation modelling (1077 papers in 10 journals). The results of these surveys confirmed our observations. We ask if this is the natural evolution of a field that has existed for half a century or an indication of a worrying problem? This paper reports on our findings and discusses whether or not simulation modelling research urgently needs to face a 'reality check.'

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Section: Studies Of Simulation Modelling Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation modelling is 50! Do we need a reality check?

Taylor

Eldabi

Riley

et al. 2009

Journal of the Operational Research Society

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“…• 1969: Alan Pritsker of Purdue University produced GASP II, which is software that aided in making simulation programming languages portable across operating systems (Hollocks 2006). At the time, this FORTRAN-based language was praised for being flexible and well documented-and it was already being taught at Arizona State University (Petersen 1969 (Hollocks 2006).…”

Section: Powers Sanchez and Lucasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the time, this FORTRAN-based language was praised for being flexible and well documented-and it was already being taught at Arizona State University (Petersen 1969 (Hollocks 2006). …”

Section: Powers Sanchez and Lucasmentioning

confidence: 99%

The exponential expansion of simulation in research

Powers

Sanchez

Lucas

2012

Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 2012 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)

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“…Simulation is a computationally intensive technology that has benefitted from increasing processor speeds made possible through advances in computer science; and with ever increasing processing speeds, the CSPs, in future, will possibly provide features that may not presently seem possible (for example, dramatic decrease in model runtime, execution of increasingly large and complex models, etc.) (Hollocks, 2006). However, it is also true that with more processing power available the simulation user may tend to develop even larger and more complicated models simply because it is possible to do so (Robinson, 2005).…”

Section: Future Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speeding Up Decision Support

Mustafee

Taylor

Katsaliaki

et al. 2010

Handbook of Research on Advances in Health Informatics and Electronic Healthcare Applications

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Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) is a decision support technique that allows stakeholders to conduct experiments with models that represent real-world systems of interest. Its use in healthcare is comparatively new. Healthcare needs have grown and healthcare organisations become larger, more complex and more costly. There has never been a greater need for carefully informed decisions and policy. DES is valuable as it can provide evidence of how to cope with these complex health problems. However, the size of a healthcare system can lead to large models that can take an extremely long time to simulate. In this chapter the authors investigate how a technique called distributed simulation allows us to use multiple computers to speed up this simulation. Based on a case study of the UK National Blood Service they demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique and argue that it is a vital technique in healthcare informatics with respect to supporting decision making in large healthcare systems.

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Forty years of discrete-event simulation—a personal reflection

Cited by 72 publications

References 40 publications

Simulation modelling is 50! Do we need a reality check?

Simulation modelling is 50! Do we need a reality check?

The exponential expansion of simulation in research

Speeding Up Decision Support

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