Introduction:

There are lot of benefits of model and simulation in an education. They have become a
part of advanced learning. Model and simulation are the best way to provide a foundation of
an effective integrating of teaching and learning. They can give some kind of virtual reality in
education. Through modelling and simulation, it will increase the level of understanding of a
student and provide a fun learning environment. Students will be more interested to learn and
make the learning and teaching process more effective. It will also help students to learn in a
better way with the use of modelling and simulation.

Modelling is an instructional strategy in which the teacher demonstrates a new concept

or approach to learn. The students will learn by observing. Modelling is one of essential
teaching tool and it is similar to but it is simpler than the system it represents. However, it
should not be so complex that it is impossible for students to understand and experiment with
it. A model is simplified representation of the actual system intended to promote a better
understanding. Condition of the model depends on the extent to which it promotes
understanding.

Simulation is a particular type of modelling. A simulation of a system is the operation

of a model of the system. The model can be reconfigured and experimented with. The
operation of the model can be studied. Hence, properties concerning the behaviour of the
actual system or its subsystem can be inferred. Simulation is a tool to evaluate the
performance of a system existing or proposed, under different configurations of interest and
over long periods of real time. Simulation model programs give the opportunity to experiment
with phenomena or events and a sense of reality in abstract fields such as information science.
The use of simulations represents the natural way of learn by doing. Just as children do
simulation activities by role playing, adults use computer simulations in order to understand
complex systems, real situation, or dynamic processes.

Stella is one of the computer simulation-based model building. Its simulation tool is
called stella. Stella is software that can be used to stimulate a system over time. It enables
students to creatively change systems and teach the students to look for relationships. It also
clearly communicate system inputs and outputs and demonstrate outcomes. It provides a
practical way to communicate and visualise on how complex system work.
 Some key features of stella are it has mapping and model that support the common
language of systems thinking and provide insight into how systems work. For example, it has
diagrams, charts and animation to help visual learners discover relationships between
variables in equation. Besides, it is a simulation and analysis that can be run over a time. It
shows a result presented as graphs, tables, animations, QuickTime movies, and file.
Communication that describes model components and facilitate manipulation are included
input devices. They are knobs, sliders, switches, buttons and output devices such as text,
graphs, table, and reports.

Advantages:

Pros and cons is a must in everything. Same goes with this computer simulation. There are
some advantages and disadvantages in using computer simulation programs in education.
There are some specific advantages connected with the computer simulation. For example,
some general advantages aspects of simulation as a form and method of learning will be
indicated. First, computer simulations offer the opportunity to experiment with phenomena or
events, which for a number of reasons, cannot normally be experimented with in the
traditional way. Simulations provide students with experience that may be difficult or
impossible to obtain in everyday life. Besides, in class it is not possible to experiment actively
with an economic system. The only thing the teacher can do is to discuss the nature and
content of the system. Experimenting would surely be useful because this can generate an
insight into the functioning of the economic system.

Other than that, computer simulation programs can be used in education. The simulation
gives the student more feeling for reality in some abstract fields of learning. This is because
simulations can be entertaining because of dramatic and game-like components. It can be
shown when a teacher tries to explain a difficult interrelationship, such as a hybridization
experiment with fruit flies in the traditional way it is likely that part of the class will fail to
understand. Execution of the real experiment is impossible because this would take a number
of weeks and therefore cannot be integrated as such within a lesson. When after the necessary
theoretical discussion of the material, a simulation experiment follows there will be a greater
chance that more students will understand a complete relationship.
 When using computer simulation program, the student is experimenting. The students will
play and active rather than passive role. This active engagement is contrast when student
listening to the teacher, they will passively listen. By using the simulation, it creates an
interactive educational setting which offers the possibility to effect changes in relation to the
learning experience more interesting and efficient way. Student will be happy and enjoy their
learning in class. Due that, their learning will be more interesting compared when not using
computer simulation in the learning process.

Moreover, the advantages of computer simulation is the apparatus necessary to be able to

carry out an experiment in reality is too expensive and often this apparatus can only be
operated by specialist, if it can be obtained at all. So, using computer simulation, it will save
the cost. Then, the process to be investigated takes place so quickly in reality that it cannot be
examined through the traditional experiment. For example, certain chemical processes
changes in a chemical reaction should be presented at such a pace in educational situations
that observation is possible. In reality, those changes can hardly be noticed and they are not
interesting for calculations, but only for the acquisition of insight.

The other advantages of stella simulation system, the student can change and insert the
parameter values that they think will produce a result that are interesting for them. They can
skip other part of aspects that are not interesting to them. By using this simulation, student
will know how to learn and conduct experiment systematically. They also can decide whether
they want to approach simulation. Students will also have many ways to achieve their
understanding.

Besides, if the simulation is well designed, the learning of how to operate the computer
simulation will become easy. Teachers just need to give a short introduction to the student.
From that, they will enable to run the simulation easily. The advantage of the computer
simulation is the student can perceives that not everything can be used as the input. For
instance, student will realize that variables and parameters have their limits and they will learn
about what input is reasonable for a particular variable and what input yields relevant
information.
Disadvantages :

It can be expensive to measure how one thing affects another, to take the initial
measurements, to create the model itself (such as aerodynamic wind tunnels).To simulate
something a through understanding is needed and an awareness of all the factors involved,
without this a simulation cannot be created.Simulation does not generate optimal solutions.It
may take a long time to develop a good simulation model .In certain cases simulation models
can be very expensive.The decision-maker must provide all information (depending on the
model) about the constraints and conditions for examination, as simulation does not give the
answers by itself.

Despite the advantages of simulation presented above, simulators, like most tools, do have
their drawbacks. Many of these problems can be attributed to the computationally intensive
processing required by some simulators. As a consequence, the results of the simulation may
not be readily available after the simulation has started an event that may occur
instantaneously in the real world may actually take hours to mimic in a simulated
environment. The delays may be due to an exceedingly large number of entities being
simulated or due to the complex interactions that occur between the entities within the system
being simulated. Consequently, these simulators are restricted by limited hardware platforms
which cannot meet the computational demands of the simulator. However, as more powerful
platforms and improved simulation techniques become available, this problem is becoming
less of a concern.

One of the ways of combating the aforementioned complexity is to introduce simplifying

assumptions or heuristics into the simulator engine. While this technique can dramatically
reduce the simulation time, it may also give its users a false sense of security regarding the
accuracy of the simulation results. For example, consider a circuit simulator which makes the
simplifying assumption that a current passing through one wire does not adversely affect
current flowing in an adjacent wire. Such an assumption may indeed reduce the time required
for the circuit simulator to generate results. However, if the user places two wires of a circuit
too close together during the design, the circuit, when fabricated may fail to operate correctly
due to electromagnetic interference between the two wires. Even though the simulation may
have shown no anomalies in a design, the circuit may still have flaws.
Another means of dealing with the computational complexity is to employ the hierarchical
approach to design and simulation so as to permit the designer to operate at a higher level of
design. However, this technique may introduce its own problems as well. By operating at too
high an abstraction level, the designer may tend to oversimplify or even omit some of the
lower level details of the system. If the level of abstraction is too high, then it may be
impossible to actually build the device physically due to the lack of sufficiently detailed
information within the design. Actual construction of the system will not be able to occur until
the user provides low level information concerning the system's subcomponents.

Applications :

Simulation Modeling is a structured approach to discovering key variable relationships within

a system. Systems take on many forms across sectors, from agriculture to aerospace and
defense to zoology. These systems are generally finite and operate within a set of defined
business rules, often forcing decision makers to make difficult tradeoffs that can result in a
range of profitable, or costly, outcomes.

To clarify options and outcomes, a simulation model is a powerful tool, aiding the decision
maker in identifying whether and to what extent Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be
achieved. This is accomplished by strategically varying model inputs such as resource
levels, funding amounts, policy measures, and business rules and measuring the resulting
outputs predicted by the model. By designing a series of varying model input parameters, the
decision maker will get an idea of the range of possible system outcomes, and how specific
changes to inputs will change the outcomes. This is useful in many scenarios, including
making hiring decisions, formulating a budget, or forecasting operational metrics.

Challenge: Top Hospital in the Washington, DC area has finalized next years staffing budget
and identified how many surgeons it would like to hire from its residency program. How
many applicants must the HR manager consider for its residency program this year in order to
have the sufficient number of resident graduates to hire next year?

Background: When hiring full time surgeons, Top Hospital prefers to hire exclusively from
its own residency program as it leads to shorter acclimation times and higher retention rates.
The hospitals residency program is a one-year cohort that requires a series of certifications,
clinics, and board examinations to successfully graduate. At each knowledge check point, the
resident is given two attempts to pass. After the second failed attempt, the resident is removed
from the program entirely.

Unfortunately for the HR manager, the cohort graduation rate is highly variable and
dependent on many factors. The most useful indicators of residency program success tend to
be undergraduate and medical school GPA, undergraduate and graduate institution,
undergraduate major, medical school specialty, and previous fellowship type.

Approach: The HR manager should design a simulation model that projects the success rate
of each of the current applicants to determine if the projected graduation class is sufficient to
meet the surgeon staffing plan.

This is accomplished by labeling each applicant with their individual success indicator
attributes, and then programming the simulation with the likelihood of the combination of
those attributes passing or failing each certification point, along with historical offer
acceptance rates. When the simulation is run, it will provide an output of how many residents
are expected to successfully complete the entire program.

Conclusion: The HR manager at Top Hospital is able to determine that it has enough
applicants with the right mix of attributes to successfully graduate and hire the desired
number of surgeons. The simulation model can then be used to hone in on a list of target
schools revealed by the model to have the highest success rates in completing the residency
program.

As seen in this use case and many others, Simulation Modeling can be a helpful in making
inferences about a set of conditions that lead to a favorable or unfavorable outcome. Because
behavior within a simulation model is represented with informed, random distributions, its
important to remember that no simulation output provides an absolute solution. There are
always caveats and sensitivities a user must digest and combine with system knowledge to
make the best decision for an organization.

Examples :

Simulation is used to model efficiently a wide variety of systems that are important to
managers. A simulation is basically an imitation, a model that imitates a real-world process or
system. In business and management, decision makers are often concerned with the operating
characteristics of a system. One way to measure or assess the operating characteristics of a
system is to observe that system in actual operation. However, in many types of situations the
cost of direct observation can be very high. Furthermore, changing some of the relationships
or parameters within a system on an experimental basis may mean waiting a considerable
amount of time to collect results on all the combinations that are of concern to the decision
maker.

In business and management, a simulation is a mathematical imitation of a real-world system.

The use of computers to conduct simulations is not essential from a theoretical standpoint.
However, most simulations are sufficiently complex from a practical standpoint to require the
use of computers in running them. A simulation can also be considered to be an experimental
process. In a set of experimental runs, the decision maker actively varies some of the
parameters or relationships in the system. If the mathematical model behind the simulation is
valid, the results of the simulation runs will imitate the results of the real system if it were to
operate over some period of time.

In order to better understand the fundamental issues of simulation, an example is useful.

Suppose a regional medical center seeks to provide air ambulance service to trauma and burn
victims over a wide geographic area. Issues such as how many helicopters would be best and
where to place them would be in question. Other issues such as scheduling of flight crews and
the speed and payload of various types of helicopters could also be important. These represent
decision variables that are to a large degree under the control of the medical center. There are
uncontrollable variables in this situation as well. Examples are the weather and the prevailing
accident and injury rates throughout the medical center's service region.

Given the random effects of accident frequencies and locations, the analysts for the medical
center would want to decide how many helicopters to acquire and where to place them.
Adding helicopters and flight crews until the budget is spent is not necessarily the best course
of action. Perhaps two strategically placed helicopters would serve the region as efficiently as
four helicopters of some other type scattered haphazardly about. Analysts would be interested
in such things as operating costs, response times, and expected numbers of patients who
would be served. All of these operating characteristics would be impacted by injury rates,
weather, and any other uncontrollable factors as well as by the variables they are able to
control.
The medical center could run their air ambulance system on a trial-and-error basis for many
years before they had any reasonable idea what combinations of resources would work well.
Not only might they fail to find the best or near-best combination of controllable variables,
but also they might very possibly incur an excessive loss of life as a result of poor resource
allocation. For these reasons, this decision-making situation would be an excellent candidate
for a simulation approach. Analysts could simulate having any number of helicopters
available. To the extent that their model is valid, they could identify the optimal number to
have to maximize service, and where they could best be stationed in order to serve the
population of seriously injured people who would be distributed about the service region. The
fact that accidents can be predicted only statistically means that there would be a strong
random component to the service system and that simulation would therefore be an attractive
analytical tool in measuring the system's operating characteristics.

BUILDING THE MODEL

When analysts wish to study a system, the first general step is to build a model. For most
simulation purposes, this would be a statistically based model that relies on empirical
evidence where possible. Such a model would be a mathematical abstraction that
approximates the reality of the situation under study. Balancing the need for detail with the
need to have a model that will be amenable to reasonable solution techniques isa constant
problem. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that a model can be successfully built so as to
reflect accurately the real-world relationships that are at play. If a valid model can be
constructed, and if the system has some element that is random, yet is defined by a specific
probability relationship, it is a good candidate to be cast as a simulation model.

Consider the air-ambulance example. Random processes affecting the operation of such a
system include the occurrence of accidents, the locations of such accidents, and whether or
not the weather is flyable. Certainly other random factors may be at play, but the analysts may
have determined that these are all the significant ones. Ordinarily, the analysts would develop
a program that would simulate operation of the system for some appropriate time period, say a
month. Then, they would go back and simulate many more months of activity while they
collect, through an appropriate computer program, observations on average flight times,
average response times, number of patients served, and other variables they deem of interest.
They might very well simulate hundreds or even thousands of months in order to obtain
distributions of the values of important variables. They would thus acquire distributions of
these variables for each service configuration, say the number of helicopters and their
locations, which would allow the various configurations to be compared and perhaps the best
one identified using whatever criterion is appropriate.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

It was noted that while there is no theoretical need to computerize a simulation, practicality
dictates that need. In the air ambulance example, analysts would require thousands of
calculations to simulate just one month of operation for one set of decision-variable values.
Multiply this by hundreds of monthly simulations, and the prospect of doing it somehow by
hand becomes absolutely daunting. Because of this problem, programming languages have
been developed that explicitly support computer-based simulation. Using such programs,
analysts can develop either of the types of simulations mentioned here, a Monte Carlo
simulation or an event-scheduling method simulation, or other types as well.

A particularly widely used language is called SIMSCRIPT. It is particularly well-suited to the

event-scheduling method. The language itself has undergone several incarnations, so different
versions, identified by Roman numeral, can be found on different computer systems. To apply
this language, analysts would develop a logical flow diagram, or model, of the system they
seek to study. SIMSCRIPT is a stand-alone language that can be used to program a wide
variety of models. Thus, someone who uses simulation regularly on a variety of problem
types might be well-served by having this type of language available.

Another widely used language is called GASP IV. It operates more as an add-in set of routines
to other high level programming languages such as FORTRAN or PL/1. With the rapid
proliferation of personal computers in recent years, specific simulation software packages,
simulation add-ins to other packages, and other capabilities have become widely available.

This capability facilitates building simulations that have different types of random
components within them. However, if the basic generator is invalid or not very effective, the
simulation results may very well be invalid even though the analysts have developed a
perfectly valid model of the system being studied. Thus, there is a need for analysts to be sure
that the underlying random number generating routines produce output that at least 'looks'
random. There is a need for external validity in a simulation model, a need for the model to
accurately imitate reality. There is just as critical a need for the building blocks within the
model to be valid, for internal validity which can be a problem when an untested random
number generator is employed.

EXPERIENTIAL GAMES

One particularly fast-growing area of simulation applications lies in experiential games.

Board games that we played as youngsters were basically simulations. Usually, some kind of
race was involved. The winner was the player who could maneuver their playing pieces
around the board, in the face of various obstacles and opponents' moves, the fastest. The basic
random number generator was usually a pair of dice. Computer-based simulations have
expanded the complexity and potential of such gaming a great deal.

Management and business simulations have been developed that are sufficiently sophisticated
to use in the college classroom setting. Almost all of these consist of specialized computer
programs that accept decision sets from the game's players. With their decision sets entered
into the computer program, some particular period of time is simulated, usually a year. The
program outputs the competitive results with financial and operating measures that would
include such variables as dollar and unit sales, profitability, market shares, operating costs,
and so forth. Some competitors fare better than others because their decisions proved to be
more effective than others in the face of competition in the computer-simulated marketplace.
An important difference between board games and business simulations lies in the complexity
of outcomes. The board game traditionally has only one winner. A well-developed business
simulation can have several winners with different players achieving success in different
aspects of the simulated market that is the game's playing field .

Simulation will continue to prove useful in situations where timely decision making is
important and when experimenting with multiple methods and variables are not fiscally
possible or sound. Simulation allows for informative testing of viable solutions prior to
implementation.