Simulation - A Guide to the Technique

This sections attempts to convey some guidelines on the whole process of conducting a simulation study because there's more to simulation than just building your simulation and analyzing the results. But because results are obviously key, it also tries to help you how to understand and validate your simulation results.

The rest of this section is divided into a series of steps, but in practice simulation is not done in a series of steps. Simulation is much more of an iterative process, cycling around until the problem is dealt with. Nevertheless, here we have described it as a series of phases to enable you to see the elements that you need to include.

This is written from the point of view of someone undertaking a consultancy role. Some of the steps are obviously not necessary if you are building a simulation for your own use - but it is still perhaps interesting to consider them because the existence of these steps highlights one of the major benefits of building simulations for yourself!