Customer Reviews

Simulation With Arena

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a good introduction to the field of discrete event simulation and the simulation language Arena in special. The first chapter of the book about the history of simulation the generic use of it and some future use. The second chapter handles basic concepts of simulation as content of a simulation model, events and randomness. In the rest of the book the discrete event simulation language Arena is explained as a sort of tutorial, using easy to understand practical examples. Although I reckon myself as a simulation expert I still use this book regular, thanks to the appendixes in which technical stuff as probability, statistics and distributions is explained, focused on the use in Arena, but also applicable for other simulation languages.

Arena is a powerful, user-friendly tool that is capable of handling a wide range of problems in business. I've found it particularly applicable to problems in telecommunications. Queueing theory is nice, but it seldom applies to many of our real-world problems. Simulations do, and Arena is one of the best. The text, examples, and exercises provide an interesting and information way to jump start you to productive simulations. Don't come here for sound simulation theory, though. This is for the practical user, but not for the student of operations research.

This book when compared with others on the subject of simulation, thrusts this very powerful tool into the hands of the user. It's conversational tone provides the reader a soothing and non threathing challenge.

I think System Modeling should ship this book with their software (I don't know, just use Arena in school and never bought it yet). This book is self-explaination. Tutorial is great. Easy to walk-through or jump to each chapter if you want to. If you are "or" will be using Arena, get this book. You won't regret it. Don't forget to check another book of Kelton. That book will take you to more detail of what simulation is.

The newest version of Arena is 5.0 . This book teaches based on the version 3.0.