Simulation Modeling and Analysis (McGraw-Hill Series in Industrial Engineering and Management)
Simulation Modeling and Analysis (McGraw-Hill Series in Industrial Engineering and Management)
Winter Simulation Conference
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate empirically the consequences of misinterpreting estimates from subject matter experts (SMEs), and to study the differences between modeling this with triangular and beta distributions. Three estimates which describe the duration of a process; minimum, maximum, and mode, is ideally sufficient as a proxy for the empirical distribution. However, these estimates might be biased when the SMEs confuse the difference between mean and mode. The analysis are performed in an ED model of a Norwegian hospital. When comparing the model output with data from the electronic patient record we see that a model with beta distributions based on the SME estimates outperforms a model with the more frequently used triangular distributions. A triangular distribution will overestimate the mean of the distribution compared to a beta distribution. We therefore encourage the use of beta distributions over triangular for activities with skewed distributions.