Controlling the precision of estimated means in interactive simulation

The computing power of modern workstations has made it possible to simulate many queueing systems interactively. Recent development in simulation software has mainly concentrated on interactive facilities. Unfortunately the precision of estimates has widely been overlooked in interactive simulation. This paper proposes a method for controlling the precision of estimated means during an interactive simulation run. Since in a typical situation of interactive simulation the user is simultaneously interested in several means, it considers both the simultaneous precision and individual precisions of the estimated means. The method is based on the existing methods for estimating standard errors and on the Bonferroni inequaltiy. The Bonferroni inequality is used to obtain a lower bound for the simultaneous precision.