A survey of discrete event simulation and state-of-the-art discrete event languages

This paper provides an introduction to the main concepts of discrete event simulation and surveys the field of current discrete event simulation languages. Discrete event simulation is a modeling technique for the study of systems whose state may change only at discrete points in time. This type of modeling is applicable to many real-world problems, and a wide variety of languages have been developed for the purpose of modeling these situations. In this paper, a survey of current discrete event simulation languages is presented. The focus of the survey is on identifying new trends in simulation languages, such as extensions to general purpose programming languages, artificial intelligence concepts, special-purpose features, and graphics-based capabilities.