STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF SIMULATION OUTPUT DATA: THE PRACTICAL STATE OF THE ART

One of the most important but neglected aspects of a simulation study is the proper design and analysis of simulation experiments. In this tutorial we give a state-of-the-art presentation of what the practitioner really needs to know to be successful. We will discuss how to choose the simulation run length. the warmup-period duration (if any). and the required number of model replications (each using different random numbers). The talk concludes with a discussion of three critical pitfalls in simulation output-data analysis.