Using Microsoft Excel to Teach Simulation Concepts to Business Students

The application of computers to solving business problems, the area of study known as decision support systems, is an important component in the education of business students today. One major type of decision support system is computer simulation, which is the technique most often used to solve queuing problems in the industry. This paper describes how to teach the concepts of computer simulation, explain the key components of simulation software, and provide hands-on experience to solve these problems by using Microsoft Excel

Why It Is Difficult to Apply Revenue Management Techniques to the Car Rental Business and What Can Be Done About It

Revenue management systems are used by airlines, hotels, and cruise lines to manipulate prices and availability of inventory in real-time, in order to increase profit. We discuss the reasons that the revenue management problem is more complex when applied to the car rental business. We then show how to simplify the model formulation and provide the human-computer interaction, organization, and procedures to make the problem tractable for the car rental business

Management Information Sources and Corporate Intelligence Systems

In this book the word “intelligence” is used in several different contexts. Intelligence can refer to the process of gathering data; it can refer to the data itself; and it can refer to the application of knowledge to product useful information from the data. We will see in this chapter how the computer can be used in business to further all three aspects of intelligence: capturing the data, storing the data in an accessible form, and adding value to the data by transforming it into useful information for decision making. This chapter is organized according to these three areas of computer support for business intelligence: 1. Transaction processing and intelligence capture 2. Data-base management and intelligence storage and retrieval 3. Decision support systems and intelligence processing We provide an overview of the concepts in transaction processing, data-base management, and decision support systems. References are listed in each of these areas for further details. Our purpose is to provide the perspective for the executive to detenmne the use of these concepts for his or her company and to understand the choices open to him or her in today’s technology

Higher Level Modeling in RESQME

RC 13554 (#60544) The RESearch Queueing Package Modeling Environment (RESQME) is a graphical workstation environment for iteratively constructing, running and analyzing models of resource contention systems. It is built on top of the RESearch Queueing Package (RESQ) which provides the functionality to evaluate extended queueing networks. In this paper we describe the high-level building component design for RESQME. The modeler is provided with tools to create his own icons and to associate them with submodels. He then uses ilicsc building blocks to construct his model. This capability extends the funtlaiiicnlal building blocks of RESQ and allows the user to create models with objccls directly related to his application domain

Application Interface Development Environment

RC 11160 (#50246) The user of interactive systems must learn a different interface for each system he uses. Furthermore the designer of such systems has limited guidelines to create good user interfaces. We describe an application interface development environment, AIDE, in which one can create and select multiple interfaces easily for a given application, and conversely one can create multiple applications with a given interface. This benefits the end-user by providing the possibility of familiar, even identical, interfaces among wide ranges of products, and this helps the designer by supporting Human Factors testing of interfaces. We formulate a model of interactive systems in which the application and interface are decoupled and the components of the interface can be changed. We also provide tools for these components and a methodology to create and sélect interfaces

An Introduction to the RESearch Queueing Package for Modeling Computer Systems and Communication Networks

A queueing network is an important tool for modeling systems where performance is principally affected by contention for resources. Such systems include computer systems, communication networks and manufacturing lines. In order to effectively use queuing networks as performance models, appropriate software is necessary for definition ofthe networks to be solved, for solution ofthe networks and for examination of the performance measures obtained. The RESearch Queueing Package (RESQ) and the RESearch Queueing Package Modeling Environment (RESQME) form a system for constructing, solving and analyzing extended queueing network models. We refer to the class of RESQ networks as extended because of characteristics which allow effective representation of system detail. RESQ incorporates a high level language to concisely describe the structure of the model and to specify constraints on the solution. A main feature of the language is the capability to describe models in a hierarchical fashion, allowing an analyst to define submodels to be used analogously to use of macros in programming languages. RESQ also provides a variety of methods for estimating the accuracy of simulation results and for determining simulation run lengths. RESQME is a graphical interface for RESQ. In this introduction, we limit our examples to computer systems and communication networks. Acknowledgement: The authors wish to thank their co-developers of RESQME: Jim Kurose and Kurt Gordon. We also want to thank Ben Antanaitis, Howard Jachter, Jack Servier, Daniel Souday and Peter Welch for their many suggestions which helped improve the RESQME package and Anil Aggarwal, Al Blum, Gary Burkland, Rocky Chang, Janet Chen, Diana Coles, Prakash Deka, Paul Lnewner, and Geoff Parker for their work in implementing RESQME. We would also like to thank our users for their ideas and feedback that we tried to incorporate in RESQ and RESQME. We remain indebted to Charlie Sauer for his design, guidance, inspiration, and development ofthe RESQ languag

Rule-Based Run Control and Evaluation for Simulation

RC 19494 (84719) Modeling projects are often faced with a large parameter space that has to be explored in order to produce a set of performance measures representing the behavior of the systems under study. In this paper, we describe a software component that provides the analyst with the functionality to specify a design of experiments and execute a search algorithm over the resulting parameter space. The component invokes the associated simulation runs and compares the results to a goal to determine the solution. This component has been implemented as the run control mechanism in the RESearch Queueing Modeling Environment (RESQME). We demonstrate the use of this experimental run control and evaluation component for simple enumeration of the parameter space, interactive evaluation, as well as generalized rule-based control

CONCEPTS AND IMPLICATIONS OF INTERACTIVE RECOVERY

RC 10562 (#47293) When working interactively on the computer, it is valuable to be able to undo a series of commands in order to return to a previous state. We identify contradictions and limitations in the basic concepts of undo. We introduce three types of undo functions with which we examine the characteristics of undo, explain these limitations, and determine the minimum requirements for a recovery facility. Then we discuss the implications of undo for user interfaces and suggest au.xiliary functions to display and simplify the resulting history structure and to view and recover prior states

SIGHT - A Tool for Building Multi-Media Structured-Document Interactive Editing and Formatting Applications

SIGHT is a tool for building applications that edit and format multi-media structured documents. The media supported include text, line graphics, handwriting, images and audio. These information media are maintained in a single integrated hierarchical database. The document architecture models documents as trees in which nodes can be shared, i.e., as directed acyclic graphs. For each document there is a logical (or abstract) represention tree and one or more physical (or layout) representation trees. A physical representation is the result of applying the formatter to a logical representation. Both trees are separate but share document content data. The physical representation is displayable and printable, but all editing effectively occurs in the logical representation. Any number of document types can be supported. A document type is defined by the node types it can contain, by how these node types can be hierarchically organized, by what each node type can contain and by the format specifications used in formatting the document. SIGHT provides applications a language to define new document types, a Core Editor, various specialized editors and a formatter. The Core Editor is further subdivided into a generic Tree Editor and a generic Node Editor. Both are not limited by document types but are sensitive to them. The Core Editor is the primary editing system

RESQME and Stand-Alone Simulation on a Workstation

RC 16037 (#71232) The Research Queueing Package Modeling Environment (RESQME) provides a graphical environment for constructing and solving extended queueing network models ofmanufacturing systems, for plotting graphs of results and for viewdng animations of models. The modeling environment can be run entirely on a workstation or optionally can execute large simulations on a host system using cooperative processing. In this paper we give a brief introduction to RESQME and to the RESQ modeling elements. We demonstrate how to use the package by constructing a simple model of part of a manufacturing line and solve this model to produce charts of performance measures and an animation which shows how the jobs flow through the system. By having the simulation available for use on the workstation and cooperatively on the host, RESQME provides a unique tool for understanding the performance of manufacturing systems. A user can do most of the model debugging locally on the workstation and make short püot runs to get a feeling for the amount of resources necessary to make more realistic experiments on the • host. Then long runs which investigate large parts ofthe parameter space can be done cooperatively on the host. Whether the model is solved on the workstation or on the hosMhe graphics environment provides the same user interface to all of the underlying files. The processor where the model is solved is transparent to the user. In aU cases, the user has easy access to plots ofresults and to the animation ofthe model diagra