-New policies, operating procedures, information flows and so on can explored without disrupting ongoing of the system.
-New hardware designs, physical layouts, transportation systems and can be tested without committing resources for their acquisition
-Time can be compressed or expanded to allow for a speed-up or slow-down of the phenomenon
-Insight can be obtained about interaction of variables to the performance
-Bottleneck analysis can be performed to discover where work in process, the system is delayed
-A simulation study can help in understanding how the system operates
-"What if" questions can be answered