Using SimPy to simulate a vaccine clinic - Part 2

model improvements

In Part 1, we created a simple simulation model of a vaccine clinic using SimPy. Now we’ll make a number of improvements to our model and use it to explore a few scenarios. Some of the things we’ll do include:

• adding a command line interface,
• specifying simulation inputs via a configuration file,
• automating the post-processing of simulation outputs to create summary statistics,
• move our code out of a Jupyter notebook and into a Python script,
• explore several clinic capacity plans using the simulation model,
• make some model extensions including handling two arrival streams - random arrivals and scheduled arrivals.

This series of notebooks and Python scripts are part of a module I teach in one of my analytics courses. In addition to all of the files needed for the module, I have also created a number of screencasts that walk you through all of the pieces. So, instead of trying to repeat all that in a blog post, I’ll just point you to the course web page for this module. The entire courseweb is a Sphinx based site.

• Discrete event simulation with SimPy