Associate Professor Christos Alexopoulos and Professor David Goldsman of the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering were awarded the INFORMS Simulation Society's 2007 Outstanding Simulation Publication Award for their paper entitled "To Batch or Not to Batch?* which originally appeared in the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, in 2004. The award was presented in December at the 2007 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) held in Washington, DC.

Simulation is a mathematical technique that imitates real-world processes over time. It works by generating an artificial history which can then be used to draw inferences about the real system. Simulation combines elements of probability, statistics, and computer science to answer interesting problems in theory and practice. The Outstanding Simulation Publication Award is given to the best paper or book on simulation-related issues that is published during the previous three years.

The winning paper studied whether better results are obtained in a simulation from batching observations into one long run or by performing several smaller runs. Alexopoulos and Goldsman found conditions under which the overall performance of the two techniques differed significantly. Their work answers a number of longstanding questions from the simulation folklore and shows that common rules of thumb used in practice may sometimes be problematic.

The WSC is the premier international forum for disseminating recent advances in the field of system simulation, with the principal focus being discrete-event simulation and combined discrete-continuous simulation. The conference includes an extensive and comprehensive program ranging from introductory tutorials to state-of-the-art research and practice. It serves as a central meeting place for simulation practitioners, researchers, and vendors working in all disciplines and in the industrial, governmental, military, and academic sectors.

The WSC is a collaboration among seven major professional organizations including American Statistical Association (ASA); Association for Computing Machinery/Special Interest Group on Simulation (ACM/SIGSIM); Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Simulation Society (INFORMS-SIM); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (IEEE/SMCS); Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE); National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); and The Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS).