A combined approach to simulation
Outline of PhD project:
The
project is in collaboration with British Telecom and my supervisors
are Roger Brooks and Stephan Onggo at Lancaster and Kjeld Jensen at BT.
I commenced the project in October 2011.
In Operational Research, two of the most widely used dynamic modelling methods for
understanding and improving organisational systems are discrete event simulation (DES)
and system dynamics (SD). Both require the creation of a model to represent the important
logical elements and the links between them that lead to the distinctive behaviour of the
system or process of interest. However, the techniques differ in their approaches to
modelling several important aspects such as time handling, stochastic behaviour, level
of aggregation and feedback and learning. The project will compare these approaches and
investigate their benefits and drawbacks. This may lead to the development of a combined
approach incorporating elements of each technique.
Check back at a later date as my research develops.