Simulation with Cots Simulation Packages : a Case Study in Health Care Supply Chain Simulation

The UK National Blood Service (NBS) is a public funded body that is responsible for distributing blood and associated products. A discrete-event simulation of the NBS supply chain in the Southampton area has been built using the commercial off-the-shelf simulation package (CSP) Simul8. This models the relationship in the health care supply chain between the NBS Processing, Testing and Issuing (PTI) facility and its associated hospitals. However, as the number of hospitals increase simulation run time becomes inconveniently large. Using distributed simulation to try to solve this problem, researchers have used techniques informed by SISO’s CSPI PDG to create a version of Simul8 compatible with the High Level Architecture (HLA). The NBS supply chain model was subsequently divided into several sub-models, each running in its own copy of Simul8. Experimentation shows that this distributed version performs better than its standalone, conventional counterpart as the number of hospitals increases.