Simulation Modelling for Business

Simulation Modelling has been used for many years in the manufacturing sector but has now become a mainstream tool in business situations. This is partly because of the popularity of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and other process based improvement methods that use simulation to help analyse changes in process design. This text book includes case studies in both manufacturing and service situations to demonstrate the usefulness of the approach. A further reason for the increasing popularity of the technique is the development of business orientated and user-friendly windows-based software. This text provides a guide to the use of ARENA, SIMUL8 and WITNESS simulation software systems which are widely used in industry and available to students. Overall this text provides a practical guide to building and implementing the results from a simulation model. All the steps in a typical simulation study are covered including data collection, input data modelling and experimentation.

Contents: Introduction to simulation modelling; Introducing simulation in the organisation; Formulating a simulation project proposal; Data collection and process mapping; Modelling input data; Building the model; Validation and verification; Experimentation and analysis; Implementation; Case studies, Andrew Greasley and Duncan Shaw; Bibliography; Index.

Andrew Greasley is a Lecturer at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham