Let's Do Ranking & Selection

Many tutorials and survey papers have been written on ranking & selection because it is such a useful tool for simulation optimization when the number of feasible solutions or “systems” is small enough that all of them can be simulated. Cheap, ubiquitous, parallel computing has greatly increased the “all of them can be simulated” limit. Naturally these tutorials and surveys have focused on the underlying theory of R&S and have provided pseudocode procedures. This tutorial, by contrast, emphasizes applications, programming and interpretation of R&S, using the R programming language for illustration. Readers (and the audience) can download the code and follow along with the examples, but no experience with R is needed.