A QUERY-DRIVEN APPROACH TO SIMULATIONS

Abstract

This paper describes a Query-Driven Simulation (QDS) approach to asking questions about outcomes of business processes. In this approach a user issues a query about outcomes of simulation runs and, based on the query asked, appropriate simulations are launched and the answer to the query is determined from the outcomes of these simulations. It is argued that Query-Driven Simulations provide a more declarative, flexible, and interactive approach to asking questions about simulation outcomes than the traditional approaches of letting the end-users run simulations and gather statistics about simulation outcomes. The paper also presents a new simulation system development lifecycle based on the QDS approach.