A simulation study on sampling and selecting under fixed computing budget

Abstract

For many real world problems, when the design space is huge and unstructured and time consuming simulation is needed to estimate the performance measure, it is important to decide how many designs should be sampled and how long the simulation should be run for each design alternative given that we only have a fixed amount of computing time. In this paper, we present a simulation study on how the distribution of the performance measure and the distribution of the estimation error/noise will affect the decision. From the analysis, it is observed that when the noise is bounded and if there is a high chance that we can get the smallest noise, then the decision will be to sample as many as possible, but if the noise is unbounded, then it will be important to reduce the level of the noise level by assigning more simulation time to each design alternative.