The KD Tocher Medal is awarded in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of simulation published in the Journal of Simulation within the relevant two year period.

This award is named in memory of KD Tocher, who made a significant contribution to the field of discrete-event simulation by developing the basis on which much modern software is built via his General Simulation Program. He is the author of “The Art of Simulation” (1963), a formative book in the field.

Citation for Tocher Medal 2019-2020

Eric Applegate, Guy Feldman, Susan Hunter, Raghu Pasupathy

Multi-objective ranking and selection: Optimal sampling laws and tractable approximations via SCORE 

Journal of Simulation Volume 14 (1) 21-40 

This year’s medal is awarded to Eric A. Applegate, Guy Feldman, Susan R. Hunter and Raghu Pasupathy, who are based across the School of Industrial Engineering and Department of Statistics at Purdue University.

The paper considers the multi-objective ranking and selection problem for a finite set of systems evaluated on three or more stochastic objectives. Within this setting comes the issue of how to allocate a given simulation budget across competing systems in order to efficiently identify the Pareto set whilst minimising the likelihood of misclassifying any of the systems.

Towards this issue, the paper presents two simulation-budget allocations, called MO-SCORE and iMO-SCORE, which maximise the misclassification-probability decay rate. Derivation of the allocations and a sequential algorithm to aid practical implementation are presented, alongside an extensive numerical evaluation that illustrates how the allocations can be used to reliably solve MORS problems in three or more objectives.