[PDF][PDF] Use of computer simulation in Florida Atlantic University's MBA program

SS Stephenson - Proceedings of the 18th annual Southeast regional …, 1980 - dl.acm.org
SS Stephenson
Proceedings of the 18th annual Southeast regional conference, 1980dl.acm.org
The MBA program at Florida Atlantic University is a general program covering all the
fundamental areas of business administration, viz: accounting, finance, management,
marketing, economics, quantitative methods and information systems. Within this traditional
framework, the Computer Systems department residing in the College of Business has
incorporated in one of the two five (5) quarter credit required courses under its jurisdiction,"
Information Systems" an extensive exercise in model construction and computer simulation …
The MBA program at Florida Atlantic University is a general program covering all the fundamental areas of business administration, viz: accounting, finance, management, marketing, economics, quantitative methods and information systems. Within this traditional framework, the Computer Systems department residing in the College of Business has incorporated in one of the two five (5) quarter credit required courses under its jurisdiction," Information Systems" an extensive exercise in model construction and computer simulation using the Dynamo language and associated industrial dynamics concepts. Dynamo, a high level procedural language developed in the 1960's by Jay Forrester, Jack Pugh and associates of the Sloane School at MIT, has been successfully used for the past eight years in this course on large scale IBM and more recently Univac system available for the student use.
Dynamo, as a language, perfectly matches the capabilities and requirements for graduate business students, many of whom, have had no previous computer experience. First and of primary value, Dynamo is a very understandable application language. This is evidenced by the fact that about 200 students annually take the course and 92% of the students complete their simulation project within the time span of the course. About 16 hours of language and model building instruction provide the needed background for the students to commence constructing and coding their model. Each student decides on his/her application to be modelled, usually from one of the business areas previously mentioned. The only major constraint is each model must deal with a common, or equivalent, unit with no queues allowed because Dynamo is a continuous simulation language in contrast to GPSS which is discrete. While the latter simulation language is more flexible and powerful than Dynamo, it was found to be too complex to learn within the time constraints and diverse background of most MBA students.
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