Needs And Approach For Combining Formal Analysis And Human Instinct In Logistics Simulation Projects

On one hand the roles of the simulation modeller and user in logistics simulation projects seem to be pretty clear and well accepted; on the other hand general and domain-specific approaches to formalise certain steps in a simulation project return to be the subject of research and development. Typically those approaches head for software engineering and tool development in order to replace the person in model building steps or most recently in trace file analysis. Unfortunately, this quite often relinquishes and intuition of the simulating person. Against this background the paper draws attention to the benefits from combining both spheres, the one of formalized algorithms and the other one of the human instinct. Based upon a discussion of simulation user needs in the logistics application area an approach is presented that allows mediating between user and software in both ways, for specifying simulation aims and questions and for deriving simulation results from seeing behind pure simulation data. By use of an example the impact the user has on a simulation project and its outcomes is illustrated. Consequently, conclusions emphasize the irreplaceable role of the user who brings in objectives, motivation and focus of the simulation project as well as domain-specific experiences and competences to understand the real message of simulation results.