SIMULATION FOR EDUCATION IN BUSINESS DECISION-MAKING

The education of skilled and qualified managers for medium-sized companies can be performed on a theoretical basis, complemented by the appropriate training period. This training, if developed in a real company, cannot provide the students with the challenges and decision problems that they will undertake in his professional career, since the effective “what-if” methodology to cope with decision-making in complex environments is too risky and expensive. In order to solve this limitation, a realistic simulationbased approach may lead the students to gain additional experience that contributes to their education as managers of a company. In this paper, the modelling, simulation, and optimization of a company, represented by means of a formalism for discrete event systems, is presented as an interesting tool for the education of decision-makers in business. In particular, the “what-if” analysis can be complemented by the comparison of the decisions made by the student with the ones provided by optimization algorithms. This approach may help the students to develop their skills for the critic analysis of their own decisions, the ones provided by decisionsupport systems, to understand the advantages and limitations of the human decisions and the automatic tools, as well as to assess the importance of collaborative work in this field.