Simulation by example for complex systems

Our goal is to support capacity management for systems such as hospitals, campuses, and cities, which utilize resources such as people, places, and things in complex ways. Simulation tools have traditionally been used for these sorts of studies, but they require expert model builders to create and maintain abstract business process models of the system under study. This can lead to a lack of representativeness and difficulty in adapting the model for additional or different study scenarios. This paper presents a new simulation approach, Simulation By Example, which overcomes these problems by guiding the simulation using traces, i.e., examples, of the behavior of the actual system but without requiring explicit business process models to be authored. Instead we rely on system instrumentation to capture the traces. We demonstrate the method in two case studies for healthcare systems as described in recent literature.