International collaborations in Web-based simulation: a focus on experimental design and optimization

This paper summarizes several years of research conducted by the authors to investigate the use of the World Wide Web in conducting large scale simulation studies. The initial efforts, at Tilburg University in 1999, were directed toward accessing several computer processors via the Web and assigning each processor a portion of the simulation workload in a parallel replications simulation format. This early work utilized models coded in the Java-based Silk simulation language. By 2001, this research had extended the Web-based simulation approach to more widely used simulation languages such as Arena. The present state of this research is that large scale simulation studies can be conducted on a set of computers, accessed through the Web, in a fraction of the time needed using a single processor.