Links of Interest

If you want to learn more about quantitative modeling, simulation, decision analysis and risk analysis, these web sites are a good place to start:

General Simulation, Decision Analysis and Risk Analysis Resources

• Wikipedia: Computer Simulation: A brief overview of computer simulation and its applications.
• Wikipedia: Monte Carlo Methods: A brief summary to Monte Carlo simulation.  Also provides links to other pages.
• Decision Analysis and Simulation Resources: The website of Hossein Arsham, a Professor in Decision Science, Simulation, and Statistics at the University of Baltimore.  A very nice resource with lots of additional links.
• A Collection of Modelling and Simulation Resources: A list of simulation tools assembled and maintained by Andrea Emilio Rizzoli, a research scientist affiliated with IDSIA in Switzerland.

 Societies and Associations

• Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) : The SRA focuses on risk assessment, risk characterization, risk communication, risk management, and policy relating to risk.
• Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS): Operations research (OR) is the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions. Hence, simulation, decision analysis and risk analysis all fall under the category of OR. INFORMS is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research.
• Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS): An international, multidisciplinary forum dedicated to applications, development, education, and research in modeling and simulation.
• Decision Analysis Society (DAS) This is actually part of INFORMS. The society promotes the development and use of logical methods for the improvement of decision-making in public and private enterprise. Such methods include models for decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, techniques of risk analysis and risk assessment, and computer modeling software and expert systems for decision support.
• Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Industrial engineers often uses simulation to model business and industrial processes.  IIE hosts an annual Simulation Solutions Conference (that focuses primarily on discrete event simulation).
• The System Dynamics Society: This society primarily focuses on a specific type of continuous simulation technique based on the system dynamics paradigm (developed at MIT in the 1960s).  However, most of the concepts addressed by SDS are applicable to other simulation approaches.
• ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation (SIGSIM): A group within the Association for Computing Machinery, this group aims to promote and disseminate the advancement of the state-of-the-art in simulation and modeling across a broad range of interests.
• EUROSIM (The Federation of European Simulation Societies):  This group provides a European forum for regional and national simulation societies to promote the advancement of modelling and simulation in industry, research and development.

Miscellaneous Links

• Efunda: The name of the site stands for Engineering Fundamentals.  It is a nice resource for all sorts of engineering formulas and reference tables.
• Engineering Ethics: An online ethics center for engineering and science at Case Western University.  
• Ejournal Search: A search engine for technical, academic and trade journal articles.
• How Things Work and How Stuff Works: Two very nice sites that describe in layman's terms how things work.