Semi-automated initialization of simulations: an application to healthcare
Published in The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, 2016
As the number of variables and entities included in a simulation model increase, it becomes more difficult to initialize due to (a) the increasing number of input variables that are required and (b) the difficulty in finding, retrieving, and assigning the initial values of the input variables, especially in Human Social Cultural Behavior Modeling. As a result, the initialization process is generally more time consuming and error prone which motivates the need for semi-automated approaches wherever possible. In this paper, we propose a semi-automated approach for initializing input variables that are challenging to quantify and require additional processing to be assigned their initial values. We apply this approach to initialize a healthcare simulation using data from sources such as the US Census Bureau, County Health Rankings, and Twitter.
Recommended citation: Padilla, Jose J; Diallo, Saikou Y; Kavak, Hamdi; Sahin, Olcay; Sokolowski, John A; Gore, Ross J. (2016). "Semi-automated initialization of simulations: an application to healthcare". The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation. 13(2), 171-182.
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