NEWS
@RISK Compatible with Excel 2007
@RISK 4.5 for Excel is now compatible with Excel 2007. Current maintenance holders of @RISK 4.5 can get a free update, while those without maintenance can purchase the update. With @RISK 4.5 and Excel 2007, you will enjoy significantly larger worksheets to handle vastly larger models. With 1 million rows and 16,000 columns, models that formerly spanned multiple sheets can now reside on one sheet. Additionally, @RISK 4.5 is integrated into the new Excel 2007 Ribbon interface, for easier and quicker analysis.

 

 

More information about @RISK for Excel 2007

Palisade Asia-Pacific User Conference Announced

Call for Presentations

Palisade Asia-Pacific is pleased to announce its 2007 User Conference. The event will take place September 13-14, 2007, at the Shangri-la Hotel in Sydney, Australia. Following the success of last year's inaugural forum, the Palisade User Conference will feature talks by noted risk management experts Dale Cooper and Jay Horton.

We are currently seeking presentation proposals. If you have an interesting application you would like to share utilizing Palisade software for risk analysis, decision analysis, optimization, or neural networks, please send us an e-mail today. More detail will be coming soon.

 

CASE STUDY
Risk-Based Modeling Approaches for Determining Current Liability for Future Asset Retirement Obligations

Larry Philbin, Principal Engineer, Santee Cooper
Industry Focus: Energy; Environmental
Product Focus: @RISK for Excel

Source: 2006 Palisade User Conference

Simulation tools are frequently employed by financial professionals to evaluate risk scenarios and confidence levels for uncertain stochastic variables in economic analyses.

In 2003 the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) enacted a requirement for formally determining and booking current liabilities for future retirement of assets that involve a legal requirement (such as EPA regulated hazardous waste repository decommissioning).  These retirements involve numerous uncertainties such as timelines, labor and material costs, cost of capital, inflation rate assumptions, and market risk, and thus are good candidates for simulation-based risk assessment tools.  This presentation demonstrates the application of @RISK for determination of financial obligation risk profiles and confidence levels for long-term decommissioning of storage facilities for electric power plant waste byproducts.  Potential adverse effects of underfunding future obligations due to ignoring uncertainty are illustrated.  The methodology would be applicable to other areas of financial obligation planning such as pension plan funding, etc.  Simulation models and results from an actual application are shown.

View or download the full presentation

 

 

Palisade Events
Click on an event to learn more

Free Palisade Asia-Pacific Risk Short Seminars

Hong Kong, May 2, 2007
Sydney, June 20, 2007

Palisade Asia-Pacific is offering free three-hour seminars to show you how to apply risk and decision analysis techniques to real-life problems using @RISK for Excel and the DecisionTools Suite. Topics covered include financial and other applications, Monte Carlo simulation, decision trees, optimization, and more.

 

Southern New England Chapter of Project Management Institute

Hartford, CT, May 4, 2007

Join nearly 1,000 other professionals at this full-day event covering all aspects of project management, including tools of the trade such as @RISK for Project. Stop by the Palisade stand, meet staff, and catch a demo.

 

Project Management Institute Global Congress EMEA

Budapest, Hungary, May 14-16, 2007

The PMI Global Congress 2007—EMEA is the leading project management educational and networking event in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This three-day event is the chance to gather the know-how and inspiration needed for project management success. The congress is also a meeting point for experts to discuss the most challenging project management trends. Stop by the Palisade booth and see @RISK for Project and other tools.

 

Project Management Institute Frankfurt Chapter Meeting

Frankfurt, Germany, May 28, 2007

We will be speaking at this local German chapter of PMI. Stop by and learn the latest in project risk management.

 

 

Palisade Software Techniques in the Press
Click on a headline to read the full article

Monte Carlo Simulation

Red Sox Clinch Division in March

Application: Baseball modeling

Source: eMediaWire, April 1, 2007

The Boston Red Sox clinched the American League East before the 2007 season even got started. The website http://www.coolstandings.com is simulating the 2007 baseball season using simple team statistics and Monte Carlo simulation.  

 

DFM: Who Needs it, and Why

Application: Semiconductor manufacturing

Source: Electronics Supply & Manufacturing, April 1, 2007

Design-for-manufacturability (DFM) is a simple premise based on the idea that designers should make "ease of manufacturing" a main consideration in the product development process. In fact, DFM is now one of the hottest topics in the semiconductor industry.  A number of relatively new DFM solutions bring manufacturing awareness into customers' design environments. These include building Monte Carlo models.

 

Sierra Geothermal Power Completes Drilling at Reese River, Nevada

Application: Geothermal drilling

Source: RenewableEnergyAccess.com, NH, March 26, 2007

Sierra Geothermal Power Corp. reported that drilling has been completed at the company's Reese River Project, Lander County, Nevada.  Using a Monte Carlo simulation, the potential geothermal resource at Reese River was estimated to have a 90% probability of generating 13 MW and a 50% probability of exceeding 30 MW.

 

UK Housing Corporation says Groups Must Use Risk Analysis Model to Prove Eligibility for Grant

Application: Lending portfolios

Source: Inside Housing, UK, March 8, 2007

Housing associations will have to reveal their borrowing capacity as a condition of bidding for social housing cash as part of the Housing Corporation’s bid to put a squeeze on their assets.  Information on how much more they could stretch their lending portfolios will be supplied to the housing agency in a new financial model, called the ‘Monte Carlo analysis’.

 

Study Confirms That Significant Insulin Dose Errors Can Result When Blood Glucose Meters are Miscoded

Application: Diabetes management

Source: PR Newswire, NY, March 1, 2007

When persons with diabetes use miscoded blood glucose meters to determine how much insulin to take, significant errors in insulin dose can result that may lead to health complications, according to findings of a new study just published in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology.  Monte Carlo simulations were conducted on the data from the clinical trial to generate 'ideal' and 'simulated-meter' glucose values.

 

Decision Trees

Recipe 4 Converting

Application: Marketing media planning

Source: MediaPost’s The Behavioral Insider, The Inside Line on Behavioral Marketing, March 23, 2007

“The decision tree looks at the different media sources that we’re buying media from, Google, banners or newsletters.”

 

Book Excerpt: How Doctors Think

Application: Medical diagnosis and treatment

Source: NPR.org, Washington D.C., March 15, 2007

To establish a more organized structure, medical students and residents are being taught to follow preset algorithms and practice guidelines in the form of decision trees. Insurance companies have found it particularly attractive in deciding whether to approve the use of certain diagnostic tests or treatments.

 

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Application: Business decision-making

Source: Access North Georgia, GA, March 6, 2007

Picture yourself in your business as the decision-maker. The stock market, hiring a new employee, how much inventory to invest in.  How often are you faced with the task of not having all the information you want? Many managers like to use a tool called the decision tree.

 

High-speed DNA Fingerprinting

Application: Criminal forensics

Source: Lab Informatics, UK, March 5, 2007

A team of chemists from Cuba and Brazil has developed a novel automated method for producing DNA fingerprint profiles.  The team analyzed the results from this study using a decision tree, which can measure how well a specific attribute is able distinguish between different examples.

 

NIAAA Updates Guide on Helping Patients with At-Risk Drinking and Alcohol Use Disorders

Application: Alcoholism treatment

Source: Psychiatric Services, February 26, 2007

Epidemiologic data indicate that about three in ten U.S. adults drink alcohol at levels that elevate their risk for physical, mental, and social problems.  The guide uses decision-tree diagrams to walk clinicians through four steps.

 

Genetic Algorithm Optimization

Patch Antenna Miniaturization through Electromagnetic Genetic Algorithm Optimization

Application: Electromagnetic Design

Source: Aerospace Online, March 7, 2007

A technique based on an evolutionary optimization strategy, otherwise known as genetic algorithms, has been increasingly applied to electromagnetic design. Genetic algorithm (GA) optimization is well suited to working with existing electromagnetic (EM) simulation technologies.

 

Neural Networks

The Buzzing Of Bees Can Warn Of Nearby Poisons

Application: Bee communication

Source: Science Daily, March 19, 2007

A University of Montana research team has learned to understand the collective buzzing of bees in their hives, which can provide a biological alert system.  Bee Alert is using artificial neural networks to examine the buzzes to recognize complex patterns on sonograms.
 

 

 

New Scientific Papers Using Monte Carlo Simulation
Click on a title to read more

Evaluation of 3D Monte Carlo–Based Scatter Correction for 201Tl Cardiac Perfusion SPECT

Field: Medicine

Source: Journal of Nuclear Medicine Vol. 48 No. 4 637-644, March 30, 2007

201Tl-Chloride (201Tl) is a myocardial perfusion SPECT agent with excellent biochemical properties commonly used for assessing tissue viability. However, cardiac 201Tl SPECT images are severely degraded by photons scattered in the thorax. Accurate correction for this scatter is complicated by the nonuniform density and varied sizes of thoraxes, by the additional attenuation and scatter caused by female patients' breasts, and by the energy spectrum of 201Tl. Monte Carlo simulation is a general and accurate method well suited to modeling this scatter.

 

Atomic scale simulation of silicon etched in aqueous KOH solution

Field: Chemistry

Source: University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

In this paper we present the theoretical bases of an atomic scale model and the Monte Carlo implementation.

 

Controlled Monte Carlo method for light propagation in tissue of semi-infinite geometry

Field: Optics

Source: Applied Optics, Vol. 46, Issue 10, pp. 1597-1603, March 13, 2007

The controlled Monte Carlo method is generalized to model photon migration in turbid media of arbitrary geometries. Its implementation for the reflection geometry is exemplified in this paper.
 

 

 

Ask Amy
Expert Answers to Technical Questions

Dear Amy,

Can I combine Excel's VBA with @RISK to create custom reports?

- Z.H.

Dear Z.H.,

Absolutely! @RISK 4.5 Professional and Industrial comes with a comprehensive Excel Developer Kit (XDK) that includes a complete library of @RISK macro and function commands. The @RISK simulation engine, all 38 @RISK probability distribution functions, @RISK graph types, reporting functions, statistics functions, target analysis, sensitivity graphs and reports, correlations, distribution fitting algorithms, and more are available. Stress Testing, @RISK Goal Seek, and advanced sensitivity analysis are included as well. Every aspect of @RISK for Excel is at your command.

The interface definitions exist in both the risk.xla and AdvTools.xla files, and can be accessed by first making a "Reference" to the XLA files in your Excel model. After referencing risk.xla/AdvTools.xla, the functions and variable types exposed in these files will become available for use in a macro. Complete documentation can be found in the file "riskMacro.PDF" installed to the @RISK program directory. There is a shortcut to the documentation in the Windows start menu under "Palisade DecisionTools > Online Manuals > @RISK 4.5 Macros - Manual"

The file "Report_Macro.zip" contains an example module (RiskReport.bas) with a macro called "Main" that can be used to generate custom reports for your @RISK models. Step-by-step directions on how to set up and use the report macro in your models are included in the "HowTo.xls" file.

Download "Report_Macro.zip" example

Submit a case study
Visit http://www.palisade.com
E-mail comments or suggestions to: sales@palisade.com
©2007 Palisade Corporation, 798 Cascadilla Street, Ithaca, NY 14850 USA
$unsub