The past fifteen years have witnessed a revolution in computing capabilities. Hardware is cheaper and faster.
Software is increasingly powerful.
Improvements in software technology range from new paradigms, to graphical user interface technology, to virtual reality environments. At the same time, modern manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly complex and capital-intensive. Costly system designs require a great deal of modeling and analysis to ensure acceptable system performance after implementation. Modeling and analysis methodologies have progressed tremendously through an enormous amount of research. However, this research has focused mainly on specific modeling techniques for narrowly-defined problems.