ABSTRACT
A few decades ago, Hurrion introduced the notion of visual interactive simulation (Hurrion 1976, 1989). Its basic contribution lies in the fact that it brings analysts and stakeholders together by means of an animated display. As such, it facilitates the joint discussion on model validation/verification, and-maybe even more important-alternative and possibly better solutions to the problem that the modeling and simulation project is meant to solve (Bell and O’Keefe 1987, Bell et al. 1999). Refinement of the approach is possible building on principles of object-oriented design (Booch 1994). Object orientation was reembraced as a metaphor for simulation modeling in the 1990s, being developed for the early simulation language SimulaTM (Dahl and Nygaard 1966). It foresees in a natural one-to-one mapping of real-world concepts to modeling constructs (Glassey and Adiga 1990, Kreutzer 1993, Roberts and Dessouky 1998).
