Analysis of simulation output to compare alternatives (tutorial)

  • Authors:
  • Gordon M. Clark

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio and IBM Application Systems Division, P.O. Box 28331, Atlanta, GA

  • Venue:
  • WSC '88 Proceedings of the 20th conference on Winter simulation
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

A fundamental use for system simulation is to predict system performance in new situations or with new system designs. In other words, the analyst uses simulation to aid in answering “what if” questions. We say that simulation is used to compare alternatives. This tutorial assumes that the simulation output is stochastic and has a distribution that is unknown to the analyst. The tutorial presents methods for making comparisons by either ranking alternatives or selecting the best alternative with respect to a single output performance measure. To increase the effectiveness of the comparisons, these methods consider the use of the variance reduction technique of common random numbers.