ROBERT F. BORUCH AND ROBERT W. PEARSON During the 13th Century. a vigorous argument among Middle Eastern rabbis concerned how one ought to make a fair assessment of an olive crop value for tithing purposes. Should one consolidate the crop. systematically mix the olives. and then conscientiously draw a small random sample? Or. might one simply grab a handful of olives from the nearest basket and make an estimate of the crop's worth. The issue. of course. is one that research designers and research users confront often -- balancing the need for information against the resources that must be put...

This book brings together the personal accounts and reflections of nineteen mathematical model-builders, whose specialty is probabilistic modelling. The reader may well wonder why, apart from personal interest, one should commission and edit such a collection of articles. There are, of course, many reasons, but perhaps the three most relevant are: (i) a philosophicaJ interest in conceptual models; this is an interest shared by everyone who has ever puzzled over the relationship between thought and reality; (ii) a conviction, not unsupported by empirical evidence, that probabilistic modelling...

Networks of queues arise frequently as models for a wide variety of congestion phenomena. Discrete event simulation is often the only available means for studying the behavior of complex networks and many such simulations are non- Markovian in the sense that the underlying stochastic process cannot be repre- sented as a continuous time Markov chain with countable state space. Based on representation of the underlying stochastic process of the simulation as a gen- eralized semi-Markov process, this book develops probabilistic and statistical methods for discrete event simulation of networks of...