Improving decision making in healthcare services through the use of existing simulation modelling tools and new technologies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the viability of using distributed simulation to execute large and complex healthcare simulation models which help government take informed decisions.Design/methodology/approach – The paper compares the execution time of a standalone healthcare supply chain simulation with its distributed counterpart. Both the standalone and the distributed models are built using a commercial simulation package (CSP).Findings – The results show that the execution time of the standalone healthcare supply chain simulation increases exponentially as the size and complexity of the system being modelled increases. On the other hand, using distributed simulation approach decreases the run time for large and complex models.Research limitations/implications – The distributed approach of executing different parts of a single simulation model over different computers is only viable when the model: can be divided into logical parts and the exchange of information between these pa...

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