Simulation of the drug development process: a case study from the pharmaceutical industry

This paper uses a case study from the pharmaceutical industry to show how simulation modeling can be applied to understanding large, highly-complex processes such as drug development. It concludes that simulation provides an enhanced resource planning capability compared with that provided by traditional spreadsheet analysis. This capability difference stems from the ability of a simulation to better reflect the variation which defines such complicated processes. The conditions which facilitate exploitation of this advantage include: capturing process information at the correct level of abstraction; successfully incorporating this information into a simulation model; and allowing easy user access to critical parameters via an intuitive interface