Averill M. Law & Associates, Inc. (ALA) was founded in 1977 by Dr. Averill M. Law. We provide seminars and consulting on discrete-event and agent-based simulation, seminars and consulting on statistics, and also the ExpertFit® software for fitting probability distributions to data.
We are the world leader in simulation training, having presented more than 550 seminars in 20 countries on topics such as system design and analysis, model validation, design of experiments, agent-based simulation, manufacturing systems, management overview, and software selection. Our clients for onsite seminars include AT&T, Australian Defence Science and Technology Group, Boeing, Caterpillar, Coca-Cola, Defence Research and Development Canada, GE, GM, Hewlett-Packard, IBM (U.S., Belgium), Intel, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Lab, NASA, NATO (Netherlands), NSA, Sasol Technology (South Africa), 3M, Time Warner, UPS, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy.
Our consulting services include complete simulation studies, validation/evaluation of existing models, statistical analyses, evaluation/selection of simulation software, and litigation support. We have provided our simulation expertise to organizations such as Accenture, Booz Allen & Hamilton, Caterpillar, ConocoPhillips, Ford, Kimberly-Clark, M&M/Mars, Oak Ridge National Lab, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Marines, U.S. Navy, and Xerox.
In 1983 we developed the world’s first commercial software product for fitting probability distributions to data, which was called UniFit®. Its successor, ExpertFit®, was introduced in 1995 and has been used by thousands of organizations worldwide. Many important distribution-fitting capabilities were introduced by ExpertFit, including automated fitting of distributions, an absolute evaluation of the best-fitting distribution, numerous graphical plots, and batch mode.
In 2008 we began offering general courses on applied statistics, which cover descriptive statistics, hypothesis tests, confidence intervals, regression analysis, and much more. Our clients for onsite statistics seminars include Caterpillar, Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy (four times).
Dr. Averill M. Law, the founder and president of ALA, is widely considered to be one of the foremost experts on simulation modeling. Previously, he was a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Arizona. Dr. Law is the author of Simulation Modeling and Analysis (6th Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2024), which has been the leading simulation book since 1982 with more than 178,000 copies in print and 25,000 citations (according to Google Scholar). He was awarded the 2009 INFORMS Simulation Society Lifetime Professional Achievement Award. He has a Ph.D. in operations research from the University of California at Berkeley.