SAS Institute (www.sas.com) recently announced several new software products that should be of interest to OR/MS analysts and others involved in improving decision-making. Among the new products are:

• Sim Studio, a discrete-event simulation package with graphic user interface (GUI) and animation output, integrated fully with the main SAS package. This enables users to draw data and fit distributions of interarrival times, service times, flows, splits and other operating parameters directly from observed operational data, input those distributions directly into the simulation, embed the simulation runs within an experimental design, and produce a full response surface output depicting the results, and use the response distribution as input to an optimization, all in one package. A version in JMP is anticipated this summer, as well.

• Social Network Analyzer, embedded in the Fraud Detection package. This capability to draw social networks from contact data, possibly from multiple sources, integrated with main SAS, makes it possible to link patterns of behavior, such as medical claims submissions, with information about the associations of the party of interest. For example, a known fraudster can be readily linked to previous business partners and other people who went through claims coding classes with him, to see whether their claims show the same patterns.

• Hash objects fully embedded in Data steps. Hash objects are extremely computationally efficient linked arrays that make it possible to store and retrieve data using a computed index rather than a keys table that has to be sorted or accessed sequentially. For very large update, merge and selective extract operations, this approach reportedly can decrease run time by as much as 80 percent, even when compared to efficient sort / merge / update programs.

The announcements came at the SAS Global Forum at Washington Harbor near Washington, D.C. The conference theme was "Competing on Analytics." Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright keynoted the executive track, speaking about "Leading with Confidence in an Era of Uncertainty."

— Doug Samuelson