On November 22nd, Pieter Dat defended his master thesis entitled “Business process simulation in healthcare: the applicability of general-purpose and application-oriented simulation software”.
In this thesis, Pieter compared FlexSim HealthCare against CPNTools based on two case studies. FlexSim HC provides healthcare-specific 3D animations as well as widgets for conveniently modeling agenda’s of human resources involved in health processes. CPNTools does not provide such features but provides opportunities for modeling the overall process more explicitly.
Pieter’s first case study relates to patient flows while his second case study relates to goods logistics.
Pieter used Moody’s Method Evaluation Model in combination with a framework specific to simulation tool evaluation. The thesis concludes that FlexSim HC has advantages for simulation studies related to patient flows while the two approaches are comparable when in comes to goods logistics.
Update (14/02/2013): A related blog post has been published on the official FlexSim website.