Proceedings of the 2007 Winter Simulation Conference S. G. Henderson, B. Biller, M.-H. Hsieh, J. Shortle, J. D. Tew, and R. R. Barton, eds.. ABSTRACT Commercial simulation environments offer model devel- opers the ability to compose simulation models using ge- neric or domain specific model constructs. Most simulation environments even offer the possibility to compose custom extensions to the simulation environment for faster devel- opment of simulation models for a specific domain. This paper evaluates the functionalities for usage and develop- ment of custom domain specific extensions that 10 com- monly used simulation environments provide to model de- velopers. The findings are scored against a set of criteria, showing that currently more than half of the most used simulation environments offer support to model developers regarding domain specific extensions. 1 INTRODUCTION Simulation experts have discussed the advantages of do- main specificity of simulation environments to support model developers in several panel sessions at previous Winter Simulation Conferences (Banks et al. 2001; Dia- mond et al. 2002; Barton et al. 2003). In these panel ses- sions they concluded that the ability of model developers to create their own model constructs for their own specific domains will enable faster model development, make it easier to perform simulation experiments, and reduce veri- fication and validation efforts. All commercially available simulation environments have acknowledged these advantages and provide some way of enabling domain specificity into their environment. The simulation environments offer specific support to model developers mainly for the domains in which the en- vironments are widely applied. For example, Arena has specific templates for the domains of contact centers and high speed packaging lines (Bapat and Sturrock 2003), Promodel has a specific version for hospitals (Harrell and Price 2003) and EnterpriseDynamics offers suites dedi- cated to modelling of airports and train networks <www.enterprisedynamics.com>. The simulation environments also offer model devel- opers functionality to develop their own model constructs. In this way the model developer can develop his or her own set of model constructs to help with the model devel- opment in a typical domain. Commercial simulation envi- ronments that offer the feature of developing custom sets of model constructs apply different ways and types of de- velopment and instantiating. This paper provides an over- view of how domain specificity is offered in commercial simulation environments and how model developers can develop their own sets of domain specific model con- structs. Swain (2005) lists over 50 commercial simulation en- vironments. We decided to describe the top-10 of simula- tion environments that are the most popular within the pa- pers of the Winter Simulation Conference of 2006. Rockwell Automation (2007) provided an overview of the most referred commercial simulation environments at the conference of 2006, see Figure 1. We selected the top 10 simulation environments of this analysis. Figure 1: Most referred commercial environments (Rock- well Automation 2007). All simulation environments use different terms to re- fer to model constructs and their sets. In section 2, we will DOMAIN SPECIFIC MODEL CONSTRUCTS IN COMMERCIAL SIMULATION ENVIRONMENTS Edwin C. Valentin Systems Navigator Delftechpark 38, 2628 XH Delft, THE NETHERLANDS Alexander Verbraeck Delft University of Technology Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management Jaffalaan 5, 2628 BX Delft, THE NETHERLANDS 785 1-4244-1306-0/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE