Modelling Reactive and Proactive Behaviour in Simulation: A Case Study in a University Organisation

TL;DR

This paper compares Discrete Event Simulation (DES) and combined DES/ABS methods in modeling reactive and proactive human behaviors in service systems, finding minimal differences but emphasizing the importance of proactiveness levels.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of DES and combined DES/ABS for modeling human behaviors, highlighting the impact of proactiveness on simulation outcomes.

Findings

Proactiveness level significantly affects simulation results.

Minimal difference between DES and combined DES/ABS outcomes.

DES is recommended for similar service system analyses.

Abstract

Simulation is a well established what-if scenario analysis tool in Operational Research (OR). While traditionally Discrete Event Simulation (DES) and System Dynamics Simulation (SDS) are the predominant simulation techniques in OR, a new simulation technique, namely Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), has emerged and is gaining more attention. In our research we focus on discrete simulation methods (i.e. DES and ABS). The contribution made by this paper is the comparison of DES and combined DES/ABS for modelling human reactive and different level of detail of human proactive behaviour in service systems. The results of our experiments show that the level of proactiveness considered in the model has a big impact on the simulation output. However, there is not a big difference between the results from the DES and the combined DES/ABS simulation models. Therefore, for service systems of the type we investigated we would suggest to use DES as the preferred analysis tool.