
xiii
Preface
This book has been a long time in the making. We began experimenting
with the application of discrete event simulation to the problems of health
technology assessment around the turn of the century, but there has been no
comprehensive text that provides a guide to this somewhat unusual variant
of a common modeling technique. Until now, we have had to make do with
the excellent but slightly inapplicable texts from the engineering and opera-
tions research elds. Students and practitioners repeatedly ask us where they
can read more about our kind of discrete event simulation, and we invariably
tell them that “the book is coming”—well, ...