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Forwarded mail....
Please find, enclosed, a summary of my NSF proposal to conduct
environmental studies in Mexico using discrete event simulation. Any
comments, suggestions or other reactions are welcome. Thanks.
Jorge Luis Romeu
Associate Profeossor
Statistics and Computers
SUNY-Cortland
Cortland, NY 13045
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Jorge Luis Romeu, Ph. D. P. O. Box 6134
CASE Center, Syracuse University Syracuse, NY 13217
Visiting Researcher. FAX: :(607) 753-5979
Additional Information in WWW Home Page: http://web.syr.edu/~jlromeu
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 96 09:21:46 EDT
>From: Jorge Luis Romeu <jromeu@lynx.cat.syr.edu>
To: jromeu@lynx.cat.syr.edu
MORE ON SIMULATION STUDIES OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS
(A Summary of Proposal to the US National Science Foundation)
Jorge Luis Romeu
SUNY Cortland
September 15, 1996
Objective. This proposal seeks (i) to develop in Mexico discrete event
simulation models for the study, comparison, management and optimization of
environmental problems (especially aquatic ecosystems),
(ii) to help establish a
Mexican network of researchers interested in applying simulation and operations
research (O.R.) techniques to environmental problems,
(iii) to help train graduating
engineering seniors in these techniques and (iv) to help build a bridge between
such emerging Mexican research community and the community of simulationists
in the United States.
The present proposal is a revised version of last year's (Romeu (1995b)). We
have used as revision guidelines the comments and suggestions of our
proposal reviewers and several others especially
dealing with spelling out the contribution of our Host and the Science.
Why Simulationx. Modeling environmental problems via discrete
event simulation (and
GPSS specialized language) is both a new and useful approach. Ecological
problems are complex (Wark and Warner (1981)) and involve many
interactive factors. These are difficult to include in a mathematical
model (Hall et al. (1989)). The alternative is to simplify these models.
On the other hand, Lehr et al. (1994) argue that "stochastic methods
can be used in solving environmental models characterized by only a
few parameters; however, most models contain relatively large number
of parameters". Therefore, such model simplifications are questionable.
There is a need to find analysis tools other than mathematical models
and we propose
discrete event simulation.
Simulation modeling provides several advantages
over purely mathematical models,
in environmental studies. Through simulation, a researcher
{\bf can evaluate}, for example, alternative configurations, throughput
and capacity of proposed solutions (as done in Shaver (1994)),
or help define activities
and functions for planned systems (as in Boomer et al. (1994)).
Simulation may help
{\bf predict} (as in Ross et al. (1994)) or {\bf perform tradeoffs
between alternatives}
(as in Hand and Barr (1994)). Or it can help negociate the necessary
trade-offs between economic and ecologic gains of a given resource management
strategy with waterflow questions (as in Jourdannais et al. (1990)).
To date, however, simulation has been seldom used. Clymer (1993),
in a limited review of the simulation literature,
discusses the merits "of discrete event
model applications in the field of global
simulation" and discovers that
"very little use has been made of discrete event models in world
simulation". He then suggests a list of eight global problems for
discrete event simulation.