SimOpt: A Testbed for Simulation-Optimization Experiments

Abstract

This paper introduces a major redesign of SimOpt, a testbed of simulation-optimization (SO) problems and solvers. The testbed promotes the empirical evaluation and comparison of solvers and aims to accelerate their development. Relative to previous versions of SimOpt, the redesign ports the code to an object-oriented architecture in Python; uses an implementation of the MRG32k3a random number generator that supports streams, substreams, and subsubstreams; supports the automated use of common random numbers for ease and efficiency; includes a powerful suite of plotting tools for visualizing experiment results; uses bootstrapping to obtain error estimates; accommodates the use of data farming to explore simulation models and optimization solvers as their input parameters vary; and provides a graphical user interface. The SimOpt source code is available on a GitHub repository under a permissive open-source license and as a Python package. History: Accepted by Ted Ralphs, Area Editor for Software Tools. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant CMMI-2035086]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2023.1273 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2022.0011 ) at ( http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7468744 ).