It matches well with hand-crafted spreadsheet analyses, and has the advantage that it shows system logic and can be documented easily. Extensions to the model to perform costing or resource availability analysis can be easily incorporated as needed. Discussion Spreadsheet analysis has been used extensively to support DOE nuclear materials management. Because of the prescriptive nature of spreadsheets they are idiosyncratic and difficult to modify for sensitivity analyses. Changes require reformulation of the spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets are inherently deterministic.
They do not allow assessment of the impact of variability or unplanned outages on outcomes. Results can be designed to be conservatively high or low, but the uncertainty in the result is difficult to determine Analyses of resource limitations are difficult to implement. The internal logic used to develop the spreadsheet is difficult to audit and understand. This makes documentation and QA tedious and time consuming Discrete-event system simulation avoids all of these pitfalls. Initially implemented in programming languages, current generation simulation languages provide graphic interfaces, links for external input and output processors, and statistical support.