Handbook of Real-World Applications in Modeling and Simulation

Preface

Modeling and simulation is an important tool for representing or characterizing, understanding or analyzing, assessing or solving real-world problems. These dilemmas are unapologetically diverse, ranging from simple traffic jams to terrorist communications infrastructure; they differ in complexity from simple distribution chain adjustments to predicting human decision making. As such, these problems require a variety of methods to evaluate the phenomena and to proffer a solution. Modeling and simulation facilitates that need. Within the M&S toolbox is a variety of methods to represent (model) and iterate (simulation) entities and phenomena across numerous domains or applications. This handbook provides an orientation to various modeling and simulation methods and paradigms that are used to explain and solve the predominant challenges facing society. The handbook delves into six real-world applied domains: transportation, risk management, operations research, business process modeling, medical, and military interoperability.

Our approach is to introduce the handbook with a discussion of why M&S is a reliable analysis assessment tool for complex systems problems (Chapter 1). We will then introduce Human Behavior Modeling, the means to characterize decision making and the factors that shape and affect those decisions (Chapter 2). This type of modeling is often integral to the modeling conducted among other M&S domains. Moreover, to develop representative real-world models, ...