Ingolf Ståhl

GPSS: 40 years of development

This year GPSS celebrates its 40th birthday. This paper reports on the development during these 40 years, starting with the first version developed by Gordon at IBM in 1961, and the following development of GPSS II., GPSS III, GPSS/360 and GPSS V, all IBM products. A, major section is devoted to GPSS/H, which has dominated the GPSS scene during the last years. There is one section on the GPSSR family of GPSS versions and one on GPSS/PC and GPSS World. There are also many GPSS systems, projects and ideas of a mainly academic nature. A great number of GPSS textbooks are noted. The concluding section discusses the reasons for the popularity of GPSS.

An N-Person Bargaining Game in the Extensive Form

Can the outcome of bargaining between two rational parties be determined? Although much of the discussion in bargaining literature revolves around this question, no satisfactory answer has been found. As pointed out by e. g. Coddington (1973) all theories presented so far either do not lead to a determinate solution for any situation of interest or involve some kind of erroneous expectations as regards the opponent’s behavior.

How should we teach simulation

This paper deals with the issue of how one can teach simulation in the most time-efficient way. We first distinguish between different types of student as regards their background and future needs. We next look at reasons for studying simulation at a business school. Next we compare animation oriented simulators with simulation languages. We then study a list of desirable criteria for simulation software, in particular simulation languages, that should be used in education. We finally answer the question: Is there any system that fulfills all of these criteria?.

Micro-GPSS on the Web and for Windows: a tool for introduction to simulation in high schools

There is a demand in European high schools for learning discrete-event simulation. The best system for this appears to be micro-GPSS (General-Purpose Simulation System). Up to now, micro-GPSS has lacked a graphical user interface (GUI) for model building. In this paper, two projects for such a GUI system are presented: WebGPSS, where the GUI is developed as a Java applet and the system runs over the World Wide Web, and WinGPSS, developed by Delphi to allow for a complete interface with other Windows programs.

Teaching simulation to business students summary of 30 years' experience

I summarize my experience from having taught simulation to over 7000 students for over 30 years; to undergraduate, graduate and Ph. D. business students, executives and high school students, in five countries. I discuss how my students differed from other simulation students and my general teaching goals. I answer the question of why Discrete Events Simulation is important at a business school. I present the five main types of course modules that I have taught. I finally discuss my choice of DES software, explaining why I have chosen to use a streamlined GUI based version of GPSS, WebGPSS.

Introducing simulation across the disciplines

How to introduce simulation is a fundamental educational issue in a variety of disciplines including industrial engineering and operations management as well as product design and manufacturing. This panel will discuss, compare, and contrast various perspectives and experiences concerning introducing simulation to undergraduate and graduate students. Topics considered by the panel include the fundamental purposes of a first simulation course, modeling and analysis assignments that are given, examination topics, laboratory content, and term project experiences.

You are going to teach simulation: now what? tips and strategies

Facing the prospect of teaching a simulation course for the first time can be a bit overwhelming. This panel shares tips and strategies for teaching simulation based upon a wide variety of experiences, from academic newcomer to many years in the field, and having a variety of student audiences. We hope everyone will come away with a new idea, with our particular focus of helping new academics consider different simulation teaching approaches.

WebGPSS: the first two hours of simulation education

In this paper we present seven short lessons used for introducing management science students to discrete event simulation. It has been used both as the only element of such simulation in courses that devote only two classroom hours to this topic and as the introduction in courses that are devoted almost completely to simulation.

Discrete-event simulation for corporate financial planning

We note that discrete-event simulation is of importance for financial planning because it can at the same time handle uncertainty, the stochastic aspect, and allow us to follow a development completely over time, the dynamic aspect. It is probably of special importance for small and medium size firms in engineering and construction. We conclude that such stochastic and dynamic simulation cannot be done in a spreadsheet, but that a special language of discrete-event simulation, like GPSS, is the most suitable way of doing this. We give examples of how this can affect the teaching of finance at business schools. Finally we present a very simple program that illustrates how cash flow forecasting can be done using micro-GPSS, an easy-to-learn version of GPSS.

GPSS 50 years old, but still young

In 2011, GPSS, the General Purpose Simulation System, celebrates its 50th anniversary. At the 2001 Winter Simulation Conference there were two papers dealing with the 40th anniversary of GPSS. With these papers available on the Web, this paper will concentrate on the developments of GPSS after 2001. There are still three systems with the GPSS name that are sold, supported and improved: GPSS/H, GPSS World and the educational aGPSS systems family. There has also been a substantial development of the successor of GPSS/H, SLX. Finally, Proof Animation, which is closely connected to some of the GPSS systems, has been substantially improved during the last decade.