When simulation is the appropriate tool and when it is not appropriate; Advantages and disadvantages of Simulation; Areas of application; Systems and system environment; Components of a system; Discrete and continuous systems; Model of a system; Types of Models; Discrete-Event System Simulation; Steps in a Simulation Study. The basics of Spreadsheet simulation, Simulation example: Simulation of queuing systems in a spreadsheet.
Concepts in Discrete-Event Simulation: The Event-Scheduling / Time-Advance Algorithm, World Views, Manual simulation Using Event Scheduling; List processing. Simulation in Java; Simulation in GPSS
Review of terminology and concepts; Useful statistical models; Discrete distributions; Continuous distributions; Poisson process; Empirical distributions.
Characteristics of queuing systems; Queuing notation; Long-run measures of performance of queuing systems; Steady-state behavior of M/G/1 queue; Networks of queues; Rough-cut modeling: An illustration.
Properties of random numbers; Generation of pseudo-random numbers; Techniques for generating random numbers; Tests for Random Numbers Random-Variate Generation: Inverse transform technique; Acceptance-Rejection technique; Special properties.
Data Collection; Identifying the distribution with data; Parameter estimation; Goodness of Fit Tests; Fitting a non-stationary Poisson process; Selecting input models without data; Multivariate and Time-Series input models.
Types of simulations with respect to output analysis; Stochastic nature of output data; Absolute measures of performance and their estimation; Output analysis for terminating simulations; Output analysis for steady-state simulations.
Model building,verification and validation; Verification of simulation models; Calibration and validation of models,Optimization via Simulation