Where to Find Q.exe, MonteCarlito, treeplan.xls, PremSolv.exe and other items?

  1. Q.xls, the Excel Add ins for Queuing models. Note the license requirement is for education only.  Just download Q.exe to your laptop, and open it for your work.
  2. MonteCarlito_v1_05.xls, the Excel Add ins for Simulation models.  Note the license requirement is for education only. 
    bulletQ: How to set up MonteCarlito:  A:
    1. Download MonteCarlito to your laptop.  While your Excel@ spreadsheet with your simulation models is open, open MonteCarlito and keep it open whenever you run your simulation models.  Click Enable to activate MonteCarlito.  
    2. Go back to your Excel@ spreadsheet with your simulation models.  reserve a blank area for your simulation outputs.  The area should be at least ten rows deep and several columns wide, with the first column for the names of the output, and each additional column for each performance measure.
    3. The top left corner of the area is the number of replications of the simulation run, say, 100 (if -100 is used, the simulation will run in a faster background mode; if 100 is bold, the output will include histograms), the space to its right is the first performance measure that is an Excel@ formula as in your simulation model (You may use = to refer that Excel@ formula).  Any more performance measures will take the cells on the right side of the first performance measure in the same row.
    4. Highlight from the top left corner of the output area down right to cover all of the columns with performance measures and at least 6 or 7 rows deep.
    5. With the output area under highlight, press CTRL plus W to MonteCarlito your simulation.
    bulletQ: How to use the MonteCarlito output to analyze the results for unknown population mean?  A:
    1. You should set up your Excel@ simulation with 600 id of runs, verify the logics and Excel@ formulas with your hand computations for at least the first three rows of formulas or simulation runs,  then copy and paste the Excel@ formulas to the rest to make up the 600 simulation runs.
    2. In your Excel@ formula for a performance measure, say, get the average profit, only include simulation runs from id = 201 to id = 600.  That is, do not use the first two hundred runs, because they may not be in a steady state.  That means you actually take 400 runs in each of the MonteCarlito run, or your sample size is 400.
    3.  Use of MonteCarlito output:  Mean is the sample mean of 100 samples with 400 as sample size n.   Standard deviation is the Standard deviation (also called Standard error) of the 100 sample means.  We should use Excel@ function =TINV(alpha, degreeOffreedom) multiply the Standard deviation as the Margin of error or the half width of the confidence interval.  The Degree of Freedom in =TINV is n -1 or 400 - 1 = 399 in our example here.  You could use =COUNT(rows of runs exclude 200 runs at the top) - 1 to get the degree of freedom automatically.
    4. DON'T use the Standard error from MonteCarlito output. 
    bulletQ:  How to use the MonteCarlito output to analyze the results for unknown population proportion?  A:
    1. Use the mean of the 100 sample MonteCarlito runs as the sample proportion, use the sample size n = 400 in this case as in the answer to last question, and use Excel@ formula =TINV(alpha, degreeOFfreedom) to get teh student t value.
    2. Use the equation of  t * sqrt (p_bar *(1-p_bar)/n) for the margin of error or the half width of the confidence interval and use the equation of p_bar ± t * sqrt (p_bar *(1-p_bar)/n) to get the confidence interval.
  3. treeplan.xla, the Excel Add ins for Decision Tree or Decision Analysis.  Download treeplan.xla file, while your Excel@ file for your Decision analysis is open,  click to OPEN/TreePlan/Enable Macros.  You should see Add Ins as the last item on the top menu of your screen.  You need to do this everytime you use TreePlan within a new spreadsheet.  You do not need to run TreePlan Add ins if you have created a Decision Tree in a Excel@ file.  Note the license requirement is for education only.
  4. PremSolv.exe, the Excel Add ins of Premium Solver for LP problems.  Note the license requirement is for education only.  Instructions on Read me, PremSolv for LP.  You may want to install Premium Solver to avoid some potential bugs in Excel Solver.

     

    PSP 7.0 Education Version

    http://www.frontsys.com/PS/PremSolv.exe

    Bugs:

    1. In a simple LP run, the message \"Solver: An Unexpected Internal Error

    occured or physical memory is exhausted.\" crops up and does not allow the

    generation of the Answer, etc reports. This has only happened for some of my

    students - using Office 2007 suite and standard Solver.

     

    2.  Apparently some calculations that should result in 65535 are incorrectly output as 100000. It is not clear how deep this bug goes, but it doesn't hurt to know about it. You can test this error yourself by multiplying

    850*77.1 and getting the faulty result of 100000.

  5. Evaluation of Instructions

  6. References:

    1. Panel Urges Schools to Emphasize Core Math Skills