Economic Analysis of Manufacturing Business Opportunities Using GoldSim The area of manufacturing economics lies at the interface between engineering and business, and offers the opportunity to solve problems critical to not only the operation of manufacturing processes, but also the viability and profitability of the manufacturing business and the industry in general. There are a host of issues within this area. The Centre for Automotive Materials and Manufacturing (CAMM), at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario has concentrated on supply chain design and management and the economic analysis of manufacturing business opportunities. In the economic analysis of business opportunities, CAMM employs several tools. Cost models are developed most often as a comparative tool, used to evaluate alternative manufacturing processes or materials. These are generally spreadsheet-based, and the results can be used in other models that incorporate the dynamics of the system under investigation. The dynamic model is the other tool that CAMM has used extensively, and has been used in two forms: the systems dynamics variety, and the discrete events variety. With the adoption of GoldSim, CAMM has begun to meld these tools together, using the capabilities of the software to incorporate discrete events in a system dynamics model, and to read and write variable values to/from the spreadsheet in a dynamic fashion. For more information, check out the full article in the Fall 2002 newsletter.