A review of the research that has been devoted to the simulation of the structure and spectroscopic properties of rare-earth doped glasses is presented. Since the seminal papers of Brawer and Weber who have applied Monte-Carlo or molecular dynamics techniques, some other very important results have been reported concerning the local structure of the dopants. As a result, crystal field models have been applied and several pecularities of the optical spectra of rare earth ions in glasses have been understood
