Automatic Differentiation for Gradient Estimators in Simulation

Automatic differentiation (AD) can provide infinitesimal perturbation analysis (IPA) derivative estimates directly from simulation code. These gradient estimators are simple to obtain analytically, at least in principle, but may be tedious to derive and implement in code. AD software tools aim to ease this workload by requiring little more than writing the simulation code. We review considerations when choosing an AD tool for simulation, demonstrate how to apply some specific AD tools to simulation, and provide insightful experiments highlighting the effects of different choices to be made when applying AD in simulation.