Ordinal optimisation and simulation

Simulation plays a vital role in designing and analysing stochastic systems, particularly in comparing alternative system designs with a view to optimise system performance. Using simulation to analyse complex systems, however, can be both prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Efficiency is a key concern for the application of simulation to optimisation problems. Ordinal optimisation has emerged as an effective approach to significantly improve efficiency of simulation and optimisation. Ordinal optimisation for simulation problems achieves an exponential convergence rate. There are already several success stories of ordinal optimisation. This paper introduces the idea of ordinal optimisation, and reports some recent advances in this research. It also gives details of an extension of ordinal optimisation to a class of resource application problems.