Recently, it has been shown that the efficiency of excimer lamps can be drastically increased in a pulsed regime. A one-dimensional simulation of pulsed excimer lamps has been performed by Carman and Mildren (2003 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 36 19) (C&M). However, some computational results of the work of C&M are questionable and need to be revisited. In this paper, a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) in xenon has been simulated for operating conditions similar to those of C&M to better understand plasma dynamics in a pulsed regime. Our simulation results differ considerably from the computational results of C&M. Although these differences do not affect profoundly the plasma macro parameters measured in the C&M experiments, they offer a better understanding of plasma dynamics in pulsed DBDs and form a solid foundation for computational optimization of excimer lamps. It was found that the dynamics of breakdown and the current pulse depend significantly on the initial densities of species after a previous pulse, and so it is important to accurately simulate the plasma evolution in both the afterglow and active stages. It seems possible to modify the power deposition in the plasma by varying external discharge parameters such as the amplitude and the rise time of the applied voltage, and to modify the plasma composition by changing the pulse repetition rate and plasma decay in the afterglow stage.