Book Selection
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#2000 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/00 $15.00 www.stockton-press.co.uk/jors
Book Selection Edited by J Crocker A Artiba, VV Emelyanov and SI Iassinovski: Introduction to Intelligent Simulation: The RAO Language HP Williams: Model Building in Mathematical Programming: Fourth Edition M Gaudry and RR Mayes (Eds): Taking Stock of Air Liberalization
Introduction to Intelligent Simulation: The RAO Language A Artiba, VV Emelyanov, and SI Iassinovski Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. x 516 pp. £119.00, ISBN: 0 7923 8176 9 This book introduces a new discrete event simulation language as well as some ideas on new generation simulation systems based upon arti®cial intelligence tools. This book can be read both as a general introduction to modelling and simulation of complex systems and as a tutorial on the RAO language, a demonstration version of which is available from the Internet. RAO is an acronym for Resources-Actions-Operations. As in most classical simulation frameworks, resources might be workers, tools, conveyors; actions might be manufacturing a part, answering a call, transporting some material; an operation is de®ned as a rule, or a set of rules, depending on some parameters, which, when instantiated, give rise to a speci®c set of actions. Operations are described as production rules (if-then statements) which allow for dependency upon time; operations therefore form a sort of knowledge base for a system. The simulation language described in this book is not an easy modelling tool, but an object-oriented language in which sophisticated applications can be built. Examples are provided which show how RAO might be used to simulate classical ¯ow shops, or some Petri net model, or, through keyboard interaction, the classical Tetris game and many others. The book starts with an introduction to complex system and a survey on existing discrete event simulation tools; then a brief account of knowledge based systems and logical inference is presented. Four chapters are devoted to the basics of the RAO simulation language, while the remaining eight chapters deal with specialised aspects of the language, like animation, and more complex simulation models. This book is written in a clear and concise way; however it is neither an introduction to arti®cial intelligence in simulation, nor a tutorial on RAO. While trying to mix the tutorial part and the expository one did succeed in stimulat-
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ing the interest of the reader, but I feel that those really interested in using the language would have preferred a true manual, while those readers more interested in the methodological approach might get confused by the many RAO language listings. Also, while in the introduction several interesting aspects of object oriented simulation and of logical inference are outlined, in a later chapter most of the emphasis is given on presenting examples of models built with the language, obscuring somewhat the inherent characteristics of the proposed approach. At the end of the volume I was ver
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