Performance analysis of comercial simulation-based optimization packages: OptQuest and Witness Optimizer

Hamidreza Eskandari, Ehsan Mahmoodi, Hamed Fallah, Christopher D. Geiger
2011 Proceedings of the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)  
The objective of this study is to evaluate and compare two commercial simulation-based optimization packages, OptQuest and Witness Optimizer, to determine their relative performance based on the quality of obtained solutions in a reasonable computational effort. Two well-known benchmark problems, the pull manufacturing system and the inventory system, are used to evaluate and compare the performance of OptQuest and Witness Optimizer. Significant validation efforts are made to ensure that
more » ... ion models developed in Arena and Witness are identical. The experimental results indicate that both optimization packages have good performance on the given problems. Both packages found near-global optimal (or satisfactory) solutions in an acceptable computation time. 2363 978-1-4577-2109-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE Eskandari, Mahmoodi, Fallah and Geiger As mentioned above, performance evaluation and comparative analysis of commercial simulationbased optimization packages have rarely been considered in the literature despite its importance and viability. The objective of this study is to evaluate and compare two commercial optimization packages, OptQuest and Witness Optimizer, to determine their relative performance based on the quality of obtained solutions in a reasonable computational effort. To perform this evaluation and comparative analysis, two generic real world problems, the pull manufacturing system and the inventory system, are modeled using Arena and Witness simulation software packages. The remainder of this paper is as follows. In Section 2, we have a review on available commercial simulation-based optimization packages and OptQuest and Witness Optimizer are briefly introduced. In Section 3, two generic test problems, the pull manufacturing system and the inventory system, are described. The experimental design is explained in Section 4. Section 5 presents the experimental results and discussion and finally conclusion is given in Section 6.
doi:10.1109/wsc.2011.6147946 dblp:conf/wsc/EskandariMFG11 fatcat:46v6ofb6prb2hnirjozv4lvgg4