About YASAI

YASAI was developed at the MSIS Department of Rutgers Business School. The add-in was designed for teaching elementary Monte Carlo simulation in Microsoft Excel. Although numerous similar tools already existed, we needed one that was simple to use for mathematically unsophisticated beginning students, and could be used and installed easily without system administrator privilege. Please refer to the journal article for a detailed description of the reason we developed YASAI and our design philosophy.

YASAI is available without charge as open-source software, but without any warranty (see the disclaimer in the footer).  The source code may be viewed with Excel’s Visual Basic editor once YASAI is installed.  Enable Excel’s “Developer” tab to gain access to the Visual Basic editor.

‘YASAI’ stands for ‘Yet Another Simulation Add-In’.  ‘Yasai’ also means ‘vegetables’ in Japanese.

YASAI is a creation of Professor Jonathan Eckstein and Steven T. Riedmueller. Steve implemented YASAI as his Livingston College senior honors project, under Professor Eckstein’s supervision.  Since then, various independent study students at Rutgers have worked with Professor Eckstein to implement improvements (after installing the software, click on the lettuce in the YASAI simulation dialog box to see a full list).

To fulfill some pressing needs in modeling pollution pathways, the State of Washington Department of Ecology developed a more “industrial strength” version of YASAI called YASAIw.  Essentially all of YASAIw’s features have now been replicated in the main version of YASAI, and further features added.

There is a Google group for YASAI announcements and discussion