MIRPUR UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (MUST), MIRPUR

DEPARMENT OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Simulation & Modeling

Lecture 6: Basic Simulation Concepts

Engr. Samiullah Khan

Date: 18 May, 2021

 Basic Simulation Concept

• Virtually all simulation modeling that the practitioner is likely to be

involved in will be implemented in a simulation specific-software
package such as ARENA, AutoMod, Simscript, or SimPak

• These simulation packages:

• Facilitate and speed the development time for a simulation model

• Isolate the practitioner from an understanding of the basic concepts of

simulation modeling

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 Basic Simulation Concept
• For demonstration purposes, consider the simplest possible system that may be of interest to the
practitioner
• Examples of this simple type of system would include, but not be limited to:
• A customer service center with one representative
• A barber shop with one barber
• A loan officer in a bank
• A piece of computer-controlled machine in a factory
• An ATM machine

• Each of these simple systems consists of three types of major components:

i. Entities
ii. Queues
iii. Resources

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 Basic Simulation Concept

i. Entities
• Something that changes the state of the system

• In service systems, the entity may be a person

• In the customer service center, the entities are the customers

• Entities do not necessarily have to be people; they can also be objects

• The entities that the loan officer deals with are loan applications

• In the factory example, the entities are components waiting to be machined

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 Basic Simulation Concept

a. Entity Batches
• Collection or set of entities

• The number of entities that arrive in the system at the same time is known as the batch size

• In some systems, the batch size is always one

• In others, the entities may arrive in groups of different sizes

• Examples of batch arrivals are families going to a movie theater

• The batch sizes may be two, three, four, or more

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 Basic Simulation Concept

b. Entity Interarrival Times

• The amount of time between batch arrivals is known as the interarrival time irrespective of
batch size
• Interval from when the last batch arrived to when the current batch arrives

• The previous batch may have had only one entity, whereas the next batch has more than one

• In collecting entity arrival data it is usually easier to collect the batch interarrival time

• Interarrival time is considered input data that the practitioner would have to provide for the
model

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 Basic Simulation Concept

c. Entity Attributes
• Entities may also possess attributes

• These are variables that have values unique to each entity in the system

• An example of an attribute of this type involves the entity’s arrival time

• Attribute ARRTIME would store the simulation system time that the entity arrived in the
system

• In the case of airline passengers, the attribute PASSTYPE could hold a value corresponding
to the type of passenger the entity represents (i.e. first-class passenger, coach-class
passenger)

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 Basic Simulation Concept

ii. Queues
• Queues are the simulation term for lines

• Entities generally wait in a queue until it is their turn to be processed

• Simple systems generally use first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue priorities

• Another characteristic of simple systems is that once customers enter the system, they must
enter the queue
• Once entities enter the queue, they cannot depart/leave before receiving service

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 Basic Simulation Concept

iii. Resources
• Resources process or serve the entities that are in the queue

• Examples of resources are:

• Customer service representatives

• Barbers

• Loan officers

• Factory machines

• ATMs

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 Basic Simulation Concept
iii. Resources (Contd…)
• In simple models, resources can be either idle or busy
• Resources are idle when they are available for processing
• Resources are busy when they are processing entities
• In more complex models, resources may also be temporarily inactive or failed
• Inactive resources are unavailable because of:
• Scheduled work breaks
• Meals
• Vacations
• Preventive maintenance periods

• Failed resources would correspond to:

• Broken machines
• Out of order equipment

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 Basic Simulation Concept

iii. Resources (Contd…)

• Resources take a certain amount of processing time to service the entities

• For example, the time to total an order and receive payment, process a loan, or machine a
part

• The processing time is also frequently referred to as processing delay time or

service time
• Processing time is considered input data that the practitioner would normally have to collect
by observation

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Basic Simulation Model Components

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THANKS