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Distributed simulation with COTS simulation packages: a case study in health care supply chain simulation

Published: 03 December 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The UK National Blood Service (NBS) is a public funded body that is responsible for distributing blood and associated products. A discrete-event simulation of the NBS supply chain in the Southampton area has been built using the commercial off-the-shelf simulation package (CSP) Simul8. This models the relationship in the health care supply chain between the NBS Processing, Testing and Issuing (PTI) facility and its associated hospitals. However, as the number of hospitals increase simulation run time becomes inconveniently large. Using distributed simulation to try to solve this problem, researchers have used techniques informed by SISO's CSPI PDG to create a version of Simul8 compatible with the High Level Architecture (HLA). The NBS supply chain model was subsequently divided into several sub-models, each running in its own copy of Simul8. Experimentation shows that this distributed version performs better than its standalone, conventional counterpart as the number of hospitals increases.

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  • (2018)Perspectives on teaching modeling and simulation in a department of computer scienceProceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference10.5555/3320516.3321000(4058-4068)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2018
  • (2012)Bridging the gapACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/2379810.237981122:4(1-23)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2012
  • (2009)Scalability in distributed simulations of agent-based modelsWinter Simulation Conference10.5555/1995456.1995621(1189-1200)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2009
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cover image ACM Conferences
WSC '06: Proceedings of the 38th conference on Winter simulation
December 2006
2429 pages
ISBN:1424405017

Sponsors

  • IIE: Institute of Industrial Engineers
  • ASA: American Statistical Association
  • IEICE ESS: Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Engineering Sciences Society
  • IEEE-CS\DATC: The IEEE Computer Society
  • SIGSIM: ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling
  • NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology
  • (SCS): The Society for Modeling and Simulation International
  • INFORMS-CS: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences-College on Simulation

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Winter Simulation Conference

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Published: 03 December 2006

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WSC06
Sponsor:
  • IIE
  • ASA
  • IEICE ESS
  • IEEE-CS\DATC
  • SIGSIM
  • NIST
  • (SCS)
  • INFORMS-CS
WSC06: Winter Simulation Conference 2006
December 3 - 6, 2006
California, Monterey

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WSC '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 177 of 252 submissions, 70%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 3,413 of 5,075 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Perspectives on teaching modeling and simulation in a department of computer scienceProceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference10.5555/3320516.3321000(4058-4068)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2018
  • (2012)Bridging the gapACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/2379810.237981122:4(1-23)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2012
  • (2009)Scalability in distributed simulations of agent-based modelsWinter Simulation Conference10.5555/1995456.1995621(1189-1200)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2009
  • (2008)An analysis of emerging behaviors in large-scale queueing-based service systems using agent-based simulationProceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation10.5555/1516744.1516901(872-878)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2008

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