Monte Carlo simulation models of regular season and playoff games in the National Hockey League can be used to motivate students who are sports fans to study OR/MS models. I describe how such models can be implemented in a spreadsheet, how my colleagues and I have used them in our courses, and...

Graphical representations of spreadsheet queueing simulations can be used to teach students about queues and queueing processes. A customer graph shows the experience of every individual customer in a queue, based on arrival time, start of service, end of service, and showing clearly the length...

This paper proposes a new approach, entitled discrete event simulation with probabilistic event list (DESPEL), for approximating the project completion time and the critical path in a stochastic resource–constrained project network. Unlike the traditional discrete event simulation approach,...

Like many others, the St. Louis Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC) Pharmacy help desk receives far more calls than can be processed by current staffing levels. The objective of the study is to improve pharmaceutical services provided by the call center, by using queueing theory and...

The City of Edmonton's Emergency Medical Services (EMS) department proposed to move to a 'single start station system' (SS system) in which all ambulances would begin and end their shifts at the same location. We developed a discrete event simulation model to estimate the impact of this change...