Investigating the Benefits of Using Implicit Averaging in Construction Simulation Optimization Models

Abstract

Stochastic simulation optimization has been proposed by several researchers to optimize construction operations. Traditionally, explicit averaging is used to estimate the objective functions of candidate solutions. This is carried out by calculating the average estimates of the objective functions obtained from a number of simulation replications. However, the computation effort increases as the number of replications and the size of the search space increase. The main objective of this paper is to study the benefits of using implicit averaging and common random numbers to improve the quality of the optimum solutions while reducing the computation time. The initial results of this study showed a 91% reduction in the computation time and 2.6% improvement in the quality of the optimum solutions.

Keywords

• simulation
• optimization
• implicit averaging
• explicit averaging
• common random numbers