Education in Analytics Needed for the Modeling & Simulation Process

The increase in the availability of data has led to organizations asking how to use that data to understand their processes and to plan for their future. This paper discusses integrating analytics with modeling and simulation in a sequence of courses intended to provide organizations the ability to utilize their data to make better-informed decisions. Classical modeling and simulation education has utilized simple statistical techniques to address input data modeling and output analysis. Our premise is that a solid background in analytics provides an analyst not only with the ability to understand the data better but also the ability to improve the quality of a simulation's data inputs and the ability to analyze the increasing amount of data generated by simulations. The paper proposes a set of elements of analytics and presents how they can impact a basic set of modeling and simulation project activities.