Simulation with Arena

I believe the book does a good job of explaining how Arena works. It even has detail on implementing some of the Visual Basic for Applications which you can program to provide custom programming in your simulation. Arena is derived from the study of discrete event systems (DES), which you will need to study elsewhere. Arena provides animation of a simulated system such as a factory. However, the animation suffers jitters and jags due to the DES implementation. Arena's crudities are certainly not the author's fault. Kudos to the author.

I teach a simulation course using this book. It is one of the best textbooks I have ever used in any discipline. It is extremely well designed for an undergraduate audience. For more emphasis on the statistical fundamentals of simulation, I recommend Law and Kelton's graduate book, but if your goal is to complete a project for a company, or to prepare a comprehensive undergraduate simulation course with plenty of modeling examples and useful exercises, then this is the book that will take you from zero to hero.

Arena is a powerful, user-friendly tool that is capable of handling a wide range of problems in business. I've found it particularly applicable to problems in telecommunications. Queueing theory is nice, but it seldom applies to many of our real-world problems. Simulations do, and Arena is one of the best. The text, examples, and exercises provide an interesting and information way to jump start you to productive simulations. Don't come here for sound simulation theory, though. This is for the practical user, but not for the student of operations research.

I think System Modeling should ship this book with their software (I don't know, just use Arena in school and never bought it yet). This book is self-explaination. Tutorial is great. Easy to walk-through or jump to each chapter if you want to. If you are "or" will be using Arena, get this book. You won't regret it. Don't forget to check another book of Kelton. That book will take you to more detail of what simulation is.

This book when compared with others on the subject of simulation, thrusts this very powerful tool into the hands of the user. It's conversational tone provides the reader a soothing and non threathing challenge.