Discrete-Event Simulation and System Dynamics for Management Decision Making

Preface

The genesis of operational research (OR) in the Second World War was largely characterised by deterministic techniques with a nod to risk evaluations such as in establishing the optimum balance of merchant ships and naval protection vessels in Atlantic convoy sizes. But it was part of the promulgation of OR techniques in large nationalised industries in the late 1940s and early 1950s that simulation came to the fore. This was particularly evident in the British steel industry. The emerging power of digital computers helped enormously and, under the guidance of luminaries such as Keith Tocher, discrete-event simulation (DES) (and the three-phase system) emerged from what had previously been Monte Carlo simulation.

Later in the 1950s in the United States another luminary, Jay Forrester, was settling into a new role at MIT and he saw the possibilities of applying the ideas and concepts from control engineering to the simulation of economic and social systems. Like Tocher, he relied on the growing power of computers. In fact he had been closely involved on the hardware side even to the extent of holding a US patent for random-access magnetic core memory. Forrester launched the field of what was to be system dynamics (SD), then known as industrial dynamics, in a paper in the Harvard Business Review in 1958.

Two powerful intellects were responsible for setting in train two separate methodologies in the domain of management science (MS) that, over the subsequent decades, have ...