Teaching with Quisim
This page is for lecturers who plan a full-semester course on discrete-event simulation (DES) with Quisim, about 14 weeks with one lecture and one lab session per week. It is an outline, not lecture material: it suggests an order of topics, points to the handbook sections that cover each one, and names an exercise built on models that already exist. You write your own slides and set your own exercises.
How to use it. Read the row for a week, open the linked sections, and pick what fits your students. The handbook pages are the single source of truth for block names, attributes and numbers, so link students to them instead of copying the content into slides.
Ready-made decks. These slide decks are built around models students run themselves, most of them in the free demo:
- Introduction to Quisim for the first session: what simulation is for, the blocks, a first model.
- Week 1, Week 2 and Week 3 of the 3-week course on the free demo: from blocking to queues and servers, replications and confidence intervals, priorities and triage. They fit weeks 2, 5 and 10 of the plan below.
- How many doctors, and when?, a deck on DES in an emergency department, as a motivating or applied session, built on the Hospital Case Study. Use it early to show where the course is heading, or around week 10 for the services topic.
Reference pages used below: Handbook, Block API Reference, Cookbook, Examples, Hospital and Extrusion Line case studies, User Interface Guide.
Week-by-week plan
| Week | Topic | Read | Suggested exercise |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction and DES concepts | Why simulate?, A simulation study, step by step, How a discrete-event simulation runs, Open an example and run it, The Monitor tab, Event List | Run the built-in M/M/1 example with Animate on, pause, press Step a few times in Monitor > Events and explain each event. Deck: Introduction to Quisim. |
| 2 | Queueing review, M/M/1 | The M/M/1 Queue, Verifying the M/M/1 model against theory, Beyond M/M/1: G/G/1, Kendall notation in Quisim | Vary the utilization of the M/M/1 model from 0.5 to 0.95 and compare simulated waiting times with the formulas. |
| 3 | Building models | Core Concepts, Entity Blocks, Building a model on the canvas, How to Read an Entry | Build the Call Center from scratch; extend it with the recipes on routing by probability and priorities. |
| 4 | Random variates and input modeling | Random Number Blocks, Choosing a distribution, Input modeling: from data to parameters, When data is missing, Time-dependent arrival rates, API: Random Number Blocks | Give students about 100 measured service times (or let them time a real process): fit a distribution, then replay the data with a ContinuousDistribution block and compare EV, ESD and a Histogram. Model the four arrival rates of the hospital data with the shifts recipe. |
| 5 | Output analysis I: terminating systems, replications, confidence intervals | Terminating vs. non-terminating simulations, Which mean?, Reading the confidence interval, API: Statistics Block, Steering Block | Recipe replications for a day-long simulation; CI vs. number of replications in the flow shop. |
| 6 | Output analysis II: warm-up, batch means | Recipe warm-up, API: EnsemblePlot Block, batch means | Find the warm-up of the M/M/1 model at high load with EnsemblePlot, then compare replications with one long run using numBatches; Extrusion Exercise 4. |
| 7 | Verification and validation | Model Testing: Verification and Validation, Verification checklist, Validation in three steps | Hand students a model with planted faults (missing Queue, closed Decide) to find with the checklist. |
| 8 | From state diagrams to models | From State Diagram to Model, UML state diagrams, Virus Spread | Draw the state diagram of a machine with breakdowns, then build it (Machine state diagram, recipe breakdowns). Projects start. |
| 9 | Production systems: flow shop and job shop | Production Simulation, Flow Shop Production, Job Shop Production, Two-Step Production Line, Extrusion Line case study | Extrusion Step 1 to Step 3; Exercise 1: Bottleneck by Hand. |
| 10 | Services and healthcare | Hospital case study, Measuring Service Level, recipes impatient customers and shared workers | Hospital Exercise 1: Morning Shift and Exercise 3: Triage + Treatment. Deck: How many doctors, and when?. |
| 11 | Comparing systems, common random numbers | System Comparison with CRN, Getting CRN right, recipe comparing two configurations | Run the M/D/2 vs. M/D/1 example with and without CRN and report how much narrower the interval of the difference gets. Then compare lane layouts and lane-choice policies with the recipe several lanes or one line: which differences are real, and which are noise? |
| 12 | Design of experiments | Design of Experiments (DoE), Implementing DoE in Quisim, Explorer Block | Run a factorial design on the extrusion line (campaign size 30/40, press MTTR 15/30 min, 2/3 aging ovens) and estimate main and interaction effects on the lead time. |
| 13 | Simulation optimization | Simulation Optimization, Grid Search: M/M/10, Kiefer-Wolfowitz, BrentOptimize Block | Recipe best value of a parameter; hospital grid search with Explorer; extrusion campaign size. |
| 14 | Project presentations | A simulation study, step by step as the report structure | Teams present their project (see Assessment). |
Project work runs alongside from week 8: teams choose a system, collect or estimate data, and use weeks 9 to 13 to apply each new topic to their own model. Lab time in those weeks can be split between the exercise and the project.
Shorter formats
- Three-week block course on the free demo. Use the 3-week course with its Week 1, Week 2 and Week 3 decks.
- Three-week block course with the full version. Week 1: weeks 1 to 4 of the table (concepts, M/M/1, building models, distributions). Week 2: output analysis, V&V and one case study (hospital or extrusion), weeks 5 to 7 and 9 or 10. Week 3: CRN and optimization in brief (weeks 11 and 13) and a small project presented on the last day.
- Single workshop (half a day to a day). The Introduction to Quisim deck, the M/M/1 model built and checked against theory, then the hospital case study Steps 1 to 3 with the How many doctors, and when? deck.
- Module inside another course (operations management, queueing theory, healthcare management): pick the weeks you need; weeks 2, 5 and 10 work as a self-contained unit.
Assessment
A project fits the subject better than a written exam. Suggestions:
- Team project (2 to 4 students) on a system of their choice, following the steps of a simulation study: problem, conceptual model, data, model, verification and validation, experiments, recommendation.
- Deliverables: the
.quimodel, a short report and a presentation. Grade the reasoning (assumptions, choice of terminating or non-terminating analysis, confidence intervals, comparison method) more than the size of the model. - Small graded exercises along the way, for example the CRN comparison (week 11) or one case-study exercise, to check the methods before the project relies on them.