Intelligent simulation: Integration of SIMIO and MATLAB to deploy decision support systems to simulation environment

Discrete-event simulation is a decision support tool which enables practitioners to model and analyze their own system behavior. Although simulation packages are capable of mimicking most tasks in a real-world system, there are some decision-making activities, which are beyond the reach of simulation packages. The Application Programmers Interface (API) of SIMIO provides a wide range of opportunities for researchers to develop their own logic and apply it during the simulation run. This paper illustrates how to deploy MATLAB, as a computational tool coupled with SIMIO, as a simulation package by using a new user-defined step instance named “CallMATLAB”. A manufacturing system case study is introduced where the CallMATLAB step instance is used to create an Iterative Optimization-based Simulation (IOS) model. This model is created to evaluate the performance of different optimizers. The benefits of this hybridization for other industries, including healthcare systems, supply chain management systems, and project management problems are discussed.