Tocher Medal

The KD Tocher Medal is awarded in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of simulation published in the Journal of Simulation within the relevant two year period.

This award is named in memory of KD Tocher, who made a significant contribution to the field of discrete-event simulation by developing the basis on which much modern software is built via his General Simulation Program. He is the author of “The Art of Simulation” (1963), a formative book in the field.

This year’s medal is awarded to Mauricio Cabrera-Rios, Dick Gonzalez, Esmeralda Nino- Perez and Yaileen Mendez- Vazquez all of whom are based in Puerto-Rico. The work concerns a problem common to simulation application, namely addressing multiple criteria.  Although the paper presents it singularly as "optimization" in a particular problem, rather than other perceptions of "best", it demonstrates an optimization strategy for manipulating the parameters of a model in the presence of conflicting performance measures. It exploits Pareto Efficiency conditions in an iterative framework, improving upon previous use of Data Envelopment Analysis, with a rapid convergence. . Application to a problem with fifty decision variables is demonstrated.