What are common simulation terms?

Alan Hitchings

By Derek Weeks

 

What are some common simulation terms and what do they mean?

Alan Hitchings

By Derek Weeks

 

Common simulation terms

• Scenario: a business process map plus a collection of simulation settings.
• Resources: the people and systems that perform work in a process; information about their productivity and cost is used to calculate simulated process statistics.
• Arrivals: the patterns of work that arrive at the beginning of and during a process.
• Distributions: statistical patterns used to introduce randomness in simulations; for example, a uniform distribution produces random values between two user-specified numbers; a normal distribution produces values according to a "bell curve".