Tutorial: Analysis of simulation output to compare alternatives

A fundamental use for system simulation is to predict system performance in new situations or with new systems 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 simultation output is stochastic and has a distribution that is unknown to the analyst. The tutorial presents a method 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.