AbstractIntelligent tutoring systems (ITS) have recently found a wide range of potential applications across a multitude of disciplines and subject areas. This paper investigates the suitability and feasibility of developing ITS in the general context of OR as well as in a specific OR activity, simulation. It also examines how a current teaching aid for simulation model debugging can be transformed into an ITS and proposes a specification for the transformation process. The paper concludes that ITS could be useful in OR either for use as prime training systems or integrated in existing OR teaching packages. However, the field of ITS is in its infancy and development efforts are likely to be labour-intensive.