Design of Simulation Experiments Using DOE

Abstract

Computer simulation becomes an essential tool improving the efficiency of business processes, due its ability to mimic the behavior of the simulated processes. However, Its use is not trivial. Simulation is not “only” about model design. Planning and implementation of simulation experiments are equally important. Manufacturers of the simulation software are aware of that and they provide support also in this area such as integrated heuristics algorithms. There are other options how to improve process of experimentations and one of them is methodology of DOE (Design of experiments).This article is focusing on mentioned area of planning of the simulation experiments using DOE and it shows gained experiences on particular example. This article describes design of the experiment, how to select main factors (their influence and influence of their interaction) and experimentation itself using SW Minitab. Further there are presented experiment results given by simulation models. There are briefly discussed benefits and disadvantages of this approach.