Discrete simulation tools ranking : a commercial software packages comparison based on popularity

Abstract

This paper documents a work on all-purpose discrete event simulation tools evaluation. Selected tools must be suitable for process design (e.g. manufacturing or services industries). Rather than making specific judgements of the tools, authors, tried to measure the intensity of usage or presence in different sources, which they called "popularity". It was performed in several different ways, including occurrences in the WWW and scientific publications with tool name and vendor name. This work is an upgrade to the same study issued 5 years ago (in 2006). It is obvious that more popularity does not mean necessarily more quality or being better to the purpose of a simulation tool; however a positive correlation may exist between them. The result of this work is a short list of 19 simulation tools.