Investigating the Effectiveness of Variance Reduction Techniques in Manufacturing, Call Center and Cross-Docking Discrete Event Simulation Models

Abstract

Variance reduction techniques have been shown by others in the past to be a useful tool to reduce variance in Simulation studies. However, their application and success in the past has been mainly domain specific, with relatively little guidelines as to their general applicability, in particular for novices in this area. To facilitate their use, this study aims to investigate the robustness of individual techniques across a set of scenarios from different domains. Experimental results show that Control Variates is the only technique which achieves a reduction in variance across all domains. Furthermore, applied individually, Antithetic Variates and Control Variates perform particularly well in the Cross-docking scenarios, which was previously unknown.