How to successfully conduct large-scale modeling and simulation projects

Abstract

Conducting large-scale complex modeling and simulation (M&S) projects continues to pose significant challenges for M&S engineers, project managers, and sponsoring organizations. This advanced tutorial presents an M&S life cycle to alleviate the challenges. The M&S life cycle describes a framework for organization of the processes, work products, quality assurance activities, and project management activities required to develop, use, maintain, and reuse an M&S application from birth to retirement. It provides guidance to an M&S developer (engineer), manager, organization, and community of interest. The M&S life cycle specifies the work products to be created by executing the corresponding processes together with the integrated verification, validation and quality assurance activities. The M&S life cycle is critically needed to modularize and structure a large-scale M&S application development, and to provide valuable guidance for conducting an M&S project successfully.

Lean healthcare integrated with discrete event simulation and design of experiments: an emergency department expansion

“…In the first phase, i.e., design, we should perform the problem formulation. In this step, we define the process to be modeled, to specify the actions and goals (Balci 2011). The second step is the construction, validation, and documentation of the conceptual model.…”

A participative and facilitative conceptual modelling framework for discrete event simulation studies in healthcare

“…For example some do not include the process of knowledge elicitation as part of CM, but do consider it to be a separate preceding phase in the simulation study life cycle (Balci, 2011;Balci et al, 2008). A number of conceptual modelling (CM) definitions have been put forward in the literature and all are useful in understanding the different views and facets to CM.…”

“…Sargent (2008), considers whether a sufficiently valid representation of the real life situation is achieved in the CM outputs developed. Balci (2011) is concerned that modellers do not pay sufficient attention to problem formulation (or problem structuring). He draws attention to the danger of solving the wrong problem, which he defines as the Type III Error (Balci, 2010).…”

“…The guidance enables the facilitator to ask a range of sensible questions to support the extraction of information relevant to developing a representative CM, enabling divergent and conver-gent thinking ( (Franco and Montibeller, 2010). This makes it possible to pay particular attention to problem formulation as suggested by Balci (2011).…”

Tutorial: Tools and methodologies for executing successful simulation consulting projects

“…Understanding how different tools and methodologies should and should not be applied is a necessary skill on any project team. As noted by Balci (2011), a large-scale M&S (modeling and simulation) application development requires many areas of expertise including simulation modeling methodology, software engineering, statistics, systems analysis, project management, and problem domain-specific knowledge.…”