INFORMATION TECHNOLOGYLance B. Eliot, Feature Editor, Eliot & AssociatesUsing Simulation As a Real Toolby Lance Eliot, Feature Editor
Suppose that you wanted to set
up a new manufacturing operation for a brand new product that
your company intends to produce. Before you rush out to buy the
production line equipment and begin to physically lay out the
entire assembly line process, you would probably want to
investigate various options. How many units can you produce per
production line operation? Can you increase production by using
different equipment or different processes?
All of these preceding questions are part of a "what if" type of
analysis that you would want to perform and then discuss with
other personnel involved in the manufacturing development issue.
Of course, you could use paper and pencil to try and work through
all of the various options, but imagine how long and arduous the
effort might be via the use of such a simple tool.
Instead, if you are even just a bit computer savvy, you would be
better advised to explore the various scenarios by making use of
specialized software packages that are for simulation or
modeling. Similar in notion to using a statistical package to
help you compute statistics for a survey, a simulation package
aids you when trying to model a process and can be invaluable to
understanding the trade-off's between various options.
Earlier in my career, when I held academic positions, I wrote and
used simulations for teaching and research purposes. For example,
business school students learned about the operation of a
business by playing a simulation of businesses competing against
each other (wherein students made investment decisions and the
computer then simulated industry activities and displayed the
results of each companies' performance). From a research
perspective, I attempted to increase the sophistication of such
simulations by adding expert systems and other artificial
intelligence technology to them.
Recently, I had an opportunity to revisit the current status of
the simulation marketplace by attending the 1996 Winter
Simulation Conference. In addition to observing the latest
research related to simulations, I also had an opportunity to
review the many
simulation packages available from vendors and see how real
companies are using simulation to their competitive advantage.
If you have a potential need to perform a simulation, I strongly
recommend that you consider making use of a modern simulation
package. The latest packages are much easier to use, require less
programming expertise to set-up and run, and have dramatically
come down in price to be reasonable tools for even small-scale
simulation problems.
The massive 1,527-page conference proceedings describes dozens of
fascinating examples of simulations being undertaken by
companies, such as:
The sequence of steps required to properly make use of a
simulation package must be carefully carried out. If you create a
simulation based upon faulty data, the simulation results will be
suspect. Likewise, if you don't understand how to correctly
create the simulation, then the effort consumed to make use of
simulation packages will be misspent.
Animation. In order to readily explain the simulation to
other participants involved in your study, you may want to
incorporate animation into your simulation. Thus, if you are
analyzing a call center, you might show graphic icons of phones
on the computer display and indicate the phones being answered as
calls come into the call center. You could use colors, such as
green for call completed and red for call abandoned, and
otherwise make the simulation visually attractive to help other
personnel understand just what the simulation is trying to do.
Some of the simulation packages allow animation, while others
make it nearly impossible to incorporate animation into your
simulation. Look at the features of the simulation package and
carefully review the animation capabilities to make sure that
they match your needs.
Provided Templates and Examples. Many simulations are
really variations of other simulations. Rather than inventing a
simulation from scratch, you should always try to determine if an
existing model can be adapted for your current modeling needs. Is
there already a telecommunications network model that you could
revise to match your current telecomm simulation problem? And so
on.
Some of the simulation packages provide templates and example
simulations that you can then adapt for your own purposes. Also,
some vendors encourage their simulation package users to share
their models or contribute to a library of models. Thus, besides
looking at the features of the simulation package itself, find
out if any templates or examples are provided that might be
readily revised to meet your needs.
Programming versus Diagramming. In the good old days
(which weren't necessarily that good!), we had to write a
simulation by making use of arcane coding commands. Today, most
of the simulation packages allow you to diagrammatically create
your simulation and then fill in forms that ask for information
such as volume counts, probabilities, etc.
If your simulation requirements are straight forward, the
diagrammatic approach should be suitable. But, if your simulation
requirements are more complex, you may indeed need to augment
your simulation with "programming" -- thus, determine whether the
package you are reviewing will allow both diagrammatic and code
programming.
Simul8 (Visual Thinking Inc.). This PC-based simulation
package is one of the least expensive ones (under $500) and yet
has a number of surprisingly impressive features. The animation
capability lends itself to quickly animating a model, and the
tie-in to Visual Basic made it easy for me to expand my models.
For those circumstances where you want to quickly put together a
simulation, and need to keep your costs down doing so, Simul8 is
a great choice.
Extend (Imagine That! Inc.). Another PC-based simulation
package, but moving up closer into the $1,000 dollar club, Extend
takes a somewhat scientific approach to model building and offers
various libraries of simulation "blocks" that you bind and build
together to create your simulation. Extend also encourages
programming via the language ModL. Using Extend will require some
devoted attention, and assumes that you are quite serious about
being into simulation.
Micro Saint (Micro Analysis & Design Simulation Software
Inc.). Moving further up into the pricing range, near to
$10,000 dollar packages, Micro Saint had some interesting
examples of using simulations for an army tank control panel
layout, branch banking customer flow, and others.
So, if you are a business analyst or even a manager, and have a
problem that might lend itself to simulation, you might want to
explore your options about which options you can explore. Take a
look at the simulation marketplace and you might like what you
see.
Remember that your input is welcomed. If you have projects
addressing the information technology area, and you would like to
share this with the readers of "Information Technology," please
contact me.
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