Academic articles

Veterinarians have experienced disturbing trends related to workplace-induced stress. This is partly attributed to high levels of compassion fatigue, the emotional strain of unalleviated stress from interactions with those suffering from traumatic events. This paper presents a three-stage hybrid model designed to study the dynamics of compassion fatigue in veterinarians. A discrete event simulation that represents the work environment is used to generate client and patient attributes, and the veterinarian’s utilization throughout the day. These values become inputs to a system dynamics model that simulates the veterinarian’s interpretation of the work environment to produce quantifiable emotional responses in terms of eight emotions. The emotional responses are mapped to the Professional Quality of Life Scale, which enables the calculation of compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress measures. A pilot study using the hybrid model was conducted to assess the viability of the proposed approach, which yielded statistically significant results.

With the trend towards energy efficient buildings that diminish fossil fuel usage and carbon emissions, achieving high energy performance became a necessity. Allowing occupants to be actively involved during the design and operation phases of buildings is vital in fulfilling this goal without jeopardizing occupant satisfaction. Although different occupant behavior types were considered in prior research efforts, recent tools did not however examine simultaneously visual, thermal and acoustic comfort levels. This paper presents work targeted at efficiently studying occupant multi-comfort level using agent-based modeling with the ultimate aim of reducing energy consumption within academic buildings. The proposed model was capable of testing different parameters and variables affecting occupant behavior. Several scenarios were examined and statistical results demonstrated that the presence of different occupant behavior types is deemed necessary for a more realistic overall model, and the absence of windows results in an acoustic satisfaction with a decrease in (HVAC) use.

This paper uses agent based simulation to assess the effect of redesigning the points of access to a major public hospital complex in Chile, where nearly 15,000 people will pass through daily. The study is carried out by simulating pedestrian traffic in order to calculate density maps and service levels in hospital access and ramps. The simulation allows us to evaluate the flow of people and assess the layout performance, by identifying high patient flow areas and congested pedestrian traffic zones. By using this approach, it is possible to suggest changes to the original design and to improve pedestrian flow at hospital access points and ramps. The suggested changes reveal that pedestrian indicators could be improved, which in turn would improve the level of satisfaction of patients, relatives, and hospital personnel. A higher satisfaction level would help to reduce stress linked to hospital facilities and crowded spaces.

This paper documents a work on all-purpose discrete event simulation tools evaluation. Selected tools must be suitable for process design (e.g. manufacturing or services industries). Rather than making specific judgments of the tools, authors tried to measure the intensity of usage or presence in different sources, which they called “popularity”. It was performed in several different ways, including occurrences in the WWW and scientific publications with tool name and vendor name. This work is an upgrade to the same study issued 5 years ago (2011), which in its turn was also an upgrade of 10 years ago (in 2006). It is obvious that more popularity does not assure more quality, or being better to the purpose of a simulation tool; however, a positive correlation may exist between them. The result of this work is a short list, of 19 commercial simulation tools, with probably the nowadays’ most relevant ones.

Queuing systems of any domain oftentimes exhibit correlated arrivals that considerably influence system behavior. Unfortunately, the vast majority of simulation modeling applications and programming languages do not provide the means to properly model the corresponding input processes. In order to obtain valid models, there is a substantial need for tools capable of modeling autocorrelated input processes. Accordingly, this paper provides a review of available tools to fit and model these processes. In addition to a brief theoretical discussion of the approaches, we provide tool evaluation from a practitioners perspective. The assessment of the tools is based on their ability to model input processes that are either fitted to a trace or defined explicitly by their characteristics, i.e., the marginal distribution and autocorrelation coefficients. In our experiments we found that tools relying on autoregressive models performed the best.

In today’s rapidly changing technological scenario, tech giants revise their strategic alignment every couple of years. As a result, their workforce has to be adapted to the organization’s strategy. Members of the workforce who are neither relevant to the strategic alignment, nor can be made relevant by reskilling, have to be either outplaced (i.e. placed in an another job within organization) or separated from the organization. In geographies like Europe, where the cost of separation is very high, it becomes very important to make the right decision for each employee. In this paper, we describe a simulation based methodology to find the probability and time of outplacement of an employee. These numbers are inputs to a global problem of making the optimal decision for the entire workforce.

As high-performance computing resources have become increasingly available, new modes of computational processing and experimentation have become possible. This tutorial presents the Extreme-scale Model Exploration with Swift/T (EMEWS) framework for combining existing capabilities for model exploration approaches (e.g., model calibration, metaheuristics, data assimilation) and simulations (or any “black box” application code) with the Swift/T parallel scripting language to run scientific workflows on a variety of computing resources, from desktop to academic clusters to Top 500 level supercomputers. We will present a number of use-cases, starting with a simple agent-based model parameter sweep, and ending with a complex adaptive parameter space exploration workflow coordinating ensembles of distributed simulations. The use-cases are published on a public repository for interested parties to download and run on their own.

Agents are self-contained objects within a software model that are capable of autonomously interacting with the environment and with other agents. Basing a model around agents (building an agent-based model, or ABM) allows the user to build complex models from the bottom up by specifying agent behaviors and the environment within which they operate. This is often a more natural perspective than the system-level perspective required of other modeling paradigms, and it allows greater flexibility to use agents in novel applications. This flexibility makes them ideal as virtual laboratories and testbeds, particularly in the social sciences where direct experimentation may be infeasible or unethical. ABMs have been applied successfully in a broad variety of areas, including heuristic search methods, social science models, combat modeling, and supply chains. This tutorial provides an introduction to tools and resources for prospective modelers, and illustrates ABM flexibility with a basic war-gaming example.

Alcohol misuse is a complex systemic problem. The aim of this study was to explore the feasibility of using a transparent and participatory agent-based modelling approach to develop a robust decision support tool to test alcohol policy scenarios before they are implemented in the real world. Methods A consortium of Australia’s leading alcohol experts was engaged to collaboratively develop an agent-based model of alcohol consumption behavior and related harms. As a case study, four policy scenarios were examined.

With the advances in the information and computing technologies, the ways the manufacturing enterprise systems are being managed are changing. More integration and adoption of the system perspective push further towards a more flattened enterprise. This, in addition to the varying levels of aggregation and details and the presence of the continuous and discrete types of behavior, created serious challenges for the use of the existing simulation tools for simulating the modern manufacturing enterprise system. The commonly used discrete event simulation (DES) techniques face difficulties in modeling such integrated systems due to increased model complexity, the lack of data at the aggregate management levels, and the unsuitability of DES to model the financial sectors of the enterprise. System dynamics (SD) has been effective in providing the needs of top management levels but unsuccessful in offering the needed granularity at the detailed operational levels of the manufacturing system. On the other hand the existing hybrid continuous-discrete tools are based on certain assumptions that do not fit the requirements of the common decision making situations in the business systems.