Customer Reviews

Discrete Event System Simulation (Prentice-Hall international series in industrial & systems engineering)

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This book provides a very good introduction to discrete-event simulation. The authors start out by providing several simple examples in areas such as queueing and inventory systems, as well as reliability. After the first few chapters the reader gets a sense of what simulation represents and why it is done. In later chapters they score high marks in introducing more advanced issues, such as probability models, random number and random variate generators, queueing theory, and input modeling.

In closing, the book makes for a very good junior or senior-level introduction to simulation, and I especially am thankful that the presentation was made independent of any simulation package. Instead it focuses on those things that any good simulation package/language should have (e.g. random-number generators, built-in objects for customers and servers, statistical support for evaluating hypotheses about collected data, etc.).

Banks revised his great book with updated simulation package and information. Several new issues, such as, tools/softwares, random-variable generation, simulation termination, how to use Simulation to analysis and design computer system, many downloadable examples. Sufficient theories, to understand Simulation, are given, for instance, the Statistics and Queueing theories. Two chapters are dedicated for random-number generation. One chapter is dedicated for verification and validation of simulation models. Although it's only one chapter, several references are given for further study. IE or logistic practioner will enjoy since one chapter is for manufacturing and material handling system (wow!). Very good reference and practice.

This book brings a very complete explanation about what Discrete Event System Simulation is. From the very beginning, they introduce what Simulation is by means of simple examples that you can manage by hand. They also give a comprehensive explanation about how to determine the apropiate distribution functions to use in the simulation. And how to statistically analyze the simulation results. The book also include a comprehensive brochure of different simulation languages.

I used this text for ISE 167 course at SJSU which followed the textbook fairly closely. Textbook was well organized both in topics covered and sequence of topics. I particulary liked the chapter on the modeling of queuing systems which had very nice summary tables with all of the key equations for each type of queue. Chapters on statistical distributions were also nicely done and well written and easy to understand.

The book is focused on simulation for Industrial & Systems Engineers, so all of the examples are traditional ISE. I'm sure many of these techniques are finding themselves into much broader disciplines such as computational biology, complex systems, economics, statistical mechanics and elsewhere. I would have liked to have seen some of these broader applications.

Shortcommings of the book that I hope the authors will address in future editions:

- Examples of problems from broader disciplines as mentioned above
- No explanation of the two types of Monte Carlo methods
- Absence of Zipf's law distributions (power scalling law) in the statistical distribution chapter
- Absence of summary tables for each type of statistical distribution showing equations for pdf, cdf, mean, median, mode, SD, skewness, kurtosis, and verbal explination of types of problems the distribution is used for
- Section on random number generation for triangle function solves a specific example but does not solve the problem for the general case
- Section 7.4.2 does not properly explain the how the indices are used in the Schmidt and Taylor autocorrelation test for independency and does not compare and contrast the standard statistical autocorrelation function taught in traditional statistics courses with the S & T autocorrelation function (would like to know how they differ)

These shortcommings aside, the book is an excellent contribution to the ISE curriculum.

This book contains very well topics as input and output analysis, verification and validation, random number generation etc. I strongly recommend this book as an introduction of theoric simulation.

THEY ROBBED ME. NEVER SENT THE BOOK. Don't order anything from them it never came and no word ever from them.

My copy of this book is barely readable. Numerous parts of the text are missing. The printing is just missing here and there on the pages. Beware this edition. It is unfortunate since the content appears excellent.

very prompt and no hassel. Great price and experience. Quality of book was better than expected.

you're going to buy it because you have to. its for a class. its a good textbook.