This guide demonstrates how virtual build and test can be supported by the Discrete Event Systems Specification (DEVS) simulation modeling formalism, and the System Entity Structure (SES) simulation model ontology. The book examines a wide variety of Systems of Systems (SoS) problems, ranging from cloud computing systems to biological systems in agricultural food crops. Features: includes numerous exercises, examples and case studies throughout the text; presents a step-by-step introduction to DEVS concepts, encouraging hands-on practice to building sophisticated SoS models; illustrates virtual build and test for a variety of SoS applications using both commercial and open source DEVS simulation environments; introduces an approach based on activity concepts intrinsic to DEVS-based system design, that integrates both energy and information processing requirements; describes co-design modeling concepts and methods to capture separate and integrated software and hardware systems.

Achieving value-based healthcare, increasing quality, reducing cost, and spreading access, has proven to be extremely challenging, in part due to research that is siloed and largely focused on singular risk factors, ineffective care coordination resulting from service fragmentation, and costly unintended consequences of reform that have emerged due to the complexity of healthcare systems. Understanding the behaviour of the overall system is becoming a major concern among healthcare managers and decision-makers intent on increasing value for their systems. This book fills a gap in the literature that is becoming more evident as reform efforts proliferate: a holistic Modeling and Simulation (M&S) approach to value-based healthcare within a framework that enables designing, testing and implementing concepts to integrate resource allocations, health phenomenon dynamics, individual behaviour, and population dynamics. It presents a pathways-based efficient coordination of care model involving all stakeholders including patients, providers, care deliverers, managers, and payers. It shows how M&S can help design a better service infrastructure and describes the information technologies that are necessary to implement it successfully. It also presents global and national healthcare perspectives from Europe, USA, Asia and Africa, as well as research directions needed to realize the value-based M&S healthcare vision.