文档介绍：I)wam" n Support
sysmm
ELSEVIER Decision Support Systems 16 (1996) 275-295
Using query-.driven simulations for querying outcomes of business
processes
P. Balasubramanian a,1 Alexander Tuzhilin b
a Management IJ,formation Systems Department, School of Management, Boston Unit'ersity, Boston, MA 02215, USA
b Information Systems Department, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York Uni~,ersity, New York, USA
Abstract
When decision makers want to know outcomes of business processes in their organizations, they often use
simulations to do this. Traditionally, this is achieved by running simulations, collecting statistics and answering
questions of interests to the decision makers based on the collected statistics. This paper describes an alternative
approach to simulations, called the Query-Driven Simulations (QDS) approach, in which the user first asks the
queries of interest and then, depending on the query asked, appropriate simulations are run to answer that query.
The QDS approach empowers the end-user by making it easier, faster, and more reliable to ask ad-hoc questions
about outcomes of business processes than what is done in traditional simulations. To substantiate this point, the
paper describes the types of questions decision makers ask about outcomes of business processes and studies how
easy it is to express these questions in terms of an SQL-like query language SimQL designed for Query-Driven
Simulations. In addition, a case study of using the QDS approach in a manufacturing application developed by a
major management consulting company is presented and the QDS approach is tested on that application.
Keywords: Decision :~upport; Query-driven simulations; Discrete-event simulations; Databases; Query language