Simulation Environment for the New Millennium ( Panel )

In the late 80’s, a session was organized on “Simulation Environment of the 1990’s”. Fourteen years have passed. Where are we now with respect to the predictions made the last time? Can we make new predictions, now that new hardware and software are ever more powerful? Are we any closer to where we wanted to be with methodologies, tools, etc.? Looking back at the paper for the session “Simulation Environment of the 1990’s” in the Proceedings of the 1987 Winter Simulation Conference, many of the questions posted then are still valid since many of the issues are still unresolved. Figure 1 below is taken from Kachitvichyanukul et.al.(1987) as a reference point. Some of the questions for the panelists to addressed are listed as follows: