Simulation attacks manufacturing challenges

All during the past half-century, the environment of computing applications has evolved from large, comparatively slow mainframes with storage small and expensive by today´s standards to desktops, laptops, cloud computing, fast computation, graphical capabilities, and capacious flash drives carried in pocket or purse. All this time, discrete-event process simulation has steadily grown in power, ease of application, availability of expertise, and breadth of applications to business challenges in manufacturing, supply chain operations, health care, call centers, retailing, transport networks, and more. Manufacturing applications were among the first, and are now among the most frequent and most beneficial, applications of simulation. In this paper, the road, from newcomer to simulation in manufacturing to contented beneficiary of its regular and routine use, is mapped and signposted.