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Simulation facilitates the understanding and improvement of complex systems. Conceptual modelling is a key step in simulation studies. It has gained recognition because it may both increase engagement with stakeholders and decrease the time to implement a simulation. This scoping review's objective is to highlight approaches and platforms for electronically representing models from 1999 to 2020. The motivation is that electronic representations facilitate the sharing of conceptual models. The contribution from the review to the research of conceptual modelling and simulation is to show that conceptual models are electronically represented by broadly speaking either General-Purpose or Domain-Specific Modelling Languages. There is a slight trend towards the latter in order to better deal with application specificities and improve unambiguity in model representations, though. Thus, we identify modelling approaches, platforms, and features for electronically representing conceptual models with the potential to fill the gap between conceptual models and their corresponding simulation implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many health delivery services have required performance targets. Typically, these targets are presented as percentiles of patients to be seen within specified timeframes. These targets present hospital administrators with a resourcing problem complicated by conflicting objectives: How to minimize costs while maximizing throughput to achieve the performance targets? In this paper, we describe the use of a simulation model to evaluate the effect of changes to staff levels in a cytology department, investigating the trade-off between staff levels and turnaround times in light of performance targets specified by government. Standard practice for determining staffing levels in a cytology department uses average workload estimates and does not take into account target performance measures, task variability, and the interruptive nature of the workload of pathologists. We develop a simulation model for pathologist workload within a cytology department in New Zealand. We describe the model construction process that follows the hierarchical control conceptual modeling (HCCM) framework. We use the resulting simulation model to examine the trade-offs between staffing levels (and associated rosters) and task turnaround time. The results indicate that consideration of variation in task arrivals is important when considering the effect of staffing levels on turnaround time. Furthermore, as the cytology department is required to meet performance targets that involve maximum service times for a percentile of patients, such an approach is necessary in order to estimate the performance level of a staffing roster., (© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)