Improved design of queueing simulation experiments with highly heteroscedastic responses

Simulation experiments for analysing the steady-state behaviour of queueing systems over a range of traffic intensities are considered, and a procedure is presented for improving their design. In such simulations the mean and variance of the response output can increase dramatically with traffic intensity; the design has to be able to cope with this complication. A regression metamodel of the likely mean response is used consisting of two factors, namely, a low-degree polynomial and a factor accounting for the exploding mean as the traffic intensity approaches its saturation. The best choice of traffic intensities at which to make simulation runs depends on the variability of the simulation output, and this variability is estimated using analytical heavy traffic results. The optimal numbers of customers simulated at each traffic intensity are built up using a multistage procedure. The asymptotic properties of the procedure are investigated theoretically. The procedure is shown to be robust and to be more efficient than more naive procedures. A result of note is that even when the range of interest includes high traffic intensities, the highest traffic load simulated should remain well away from its upper limit; but the number of customers simulated should be concentrated at the higher traffic intensities used. Empirical results are included for simulations of a single server queue with different priority rules and for a complicated queueing network. These results support the theoretical results, demonstrating that the proposed procedure can increase the accuracy of the estimated metamodel significantly compared with more naive methods.