Simulation Models for Decision Making

This course is primarily aimed at third- and fourth-year undergraduate students or graduate students interested in learning simulation techniques to solve business problems. The course will introduce you to take everyday and complex business problems that have no one correct answer due to uncertainties that exist in business environments. Simulation modeling allows us to explore various outcomes and protect personal or business interests against unwanted outcomes. We can model uncertainties by using the concepts of probability and stepwise thinking. Stepwise thinking allows us to break down the problem in smaller components, explore dependencies between related events and allows us to focus on aspects of problem that are prone to changes due to future uncertainties. The course will introduce you to advanced Excel techniques to model and execute simulation models. Many of the Excel techniques learned in the course will be useful beyond simulation modeling. We will learn both Monte Carlo simulation techniques where overall outcome is of primary interest and discrete event simulation where intermediate dependencies between related events might be of interest. The course will introduce you to several practical issues in simulation modeling that are normally not covered in textbooks. The course uses a few running examples throughout the course to demonstrate concepts and provide concrete modeling examples. After taking the course a student will be able to develop fairly advanced simulation models to explore fairly broad range of business environments and outcomes.