Forty years of discrete-event simulation – a personal reflection

Discrete-event simulation first emerged in the late 1950s and it has grown in popularity steadily to be now recognized as the most frequently used of the classical Operational Research techniques across a range of industries – manufacturing, travel, finance, health and beyond. I have been engaged with such simulation from 1964 up to the present day. This paper reviews the history and evolution of discrete-event simulation from this personal perspective, with a particular interest in software development up to 1992. Extrapolating from that history, the paper goes on to comment on the prospective continuing evolution of simulation and its software.