The web has grown tremendously over the past decade with applications in education, marketing, financial services, supply chain management, and logistics. The web technology is also having a significant impact on the field of computer simulation. Web-based simulation reflects more of a technology transfer than a robust theoretical development; rapid advances are achieved through practical applications. There are several advantages for web-based simulation:

• can be accessed through Internet or Intranet using any web browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer
• can be run on a local or remote computer
• can provides excellent graphical animation and interface
• is platform-independent and operating-system-independent
• needs very minimum maintenance

We are developing a state-of-the-art web-based simulation tool. In addition to the modeling capability, we focus on the integration of simulation and decision making. The efficiency is significantly improved using our another technology Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (OCBA), which can intelligently determine the best simulation lengths for all simulation experiments and significantly reduce the total computation cost for obtaining the same confidence level. Numerical testing shows that our approach can obtain the same simulation quality with only one-tenth the simulation effort.

Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (OCBA) Demo Using Your Web browser. This demo of OCBA is implemented by Tagar Olson and Sy Dale. For illustration, a two-station tandem queueing system is considered. You can change the parameters in this system. You can choose the number of processors you have for the simulation. In the demo, you will see how OCBA dynamically select the worthies designs for further simulation. Further, you can run the simulation using your web browser.

Penn BMC Network Simulation. This is a web-based simulation prototype for the USPS Bulk Mail Center Network.

Web-Based Distributed Simulation. You can establish your distributed simulation network by a simple click using the web browser of each local computer. Simulation process and results can be seen from each local computer and the server.

Selected Publications

• "Distributed Web-Based Simulation Experiments For Optimization," with E. Yücesan, Y. C. Luo, and I. Lee Journal of Simulation Practice and Theory, Vol. 9, pp. 73-90, September 2001.
• "Distributed Web-Based Simulation Optimization," with Y. C. Luo, C. H. Chen, E. Yücesan, and I. Lee, Proceedings of the 2000 Winter Simulation Conference, December 2000.
• "Web-Based Simulation and Decision Support System for Bulk Mail Parcel Network Planning," with P. Hahn, J. Lin, and E. Morlok, Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Forum, November 2000.
• "Simulation Budget Allocation for Further Enhancing the Efficiency of Ordinal Optimization," with J. Lin, E. Yücesan, and S. E. Chick, Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theory and Applications, July 2000.
• "Web-Based Simulation Experiments," with E. Yucesan, and I. Lee, Proceedings of the 1998 Winter Simulation Conference, 1998.

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