Introduction to Simulation: Programming Techniques and Methods of Analysis.

Abstract

Simulation studies represent a wide spread and increasingly important area of application for digital computers. As such, simulation is an important topic for students in the computer science discipline. It is also an important topic for students and practitioners in many other disciplines, including engineering, business administration, and the quantitative sciences. Usually the most crucial factor required in applying simulation successfully in a specific problem area is knowledge of that problem area. Thus, the most appropriate person to develop a simulation study is the person most familiar with the system to be studied. However, the development of effective and efficient computer programs can also be critical in these projects. Often this requires the participation of programming specialists as well as subject specialists. The objective of this text book is to provide an introduction to the use of digital computers in simulation studies. It is aimed toward upper-division under¬graduate students who have completed an introductory programming course and abasie lower-division sequence of mathematics courses, including an introduction to statistics. The topics covered include methods for programming discrete-event model simulations and methods for the analysis of simulation results. The approach used in this book is to emphasize programming aspects of the simulation process and to cover a few specific examples in detail. Previous experience in teaching simulation-related courses has indicated that many students do not have an intuitive feeling for processes which involve dynamic interaction. Therefore, the approach of going from concrete examples to the more general concepts, rather than vice versa, enables a significantiy larger portion of the students to gain a reasonable understanding of the primary ide as which underlie the simulation process.