Determining Distributions

This is a continuation of the Inventory Management problem you just did. You might have suggested using the solver to determine the underlying distribution of customer demand for your perishable item.

You have five years of customer order information (or customer demand informationhow might you know that?) that you want to use as the basis for your distribution of customer demands. The file is under Distribution Determination on Canvas.

Is it reasonable to assume you have collected these data? (Same rules apply for italics!)

How might you start your analysis of the underlying distribution?

What step might you take to determine if using all five years of data is appropriate?

How can you leverage your customer demand data without fitting it to a pre-defined distribution, and still randomly sample the (actual) distribution in your simulation?

Implement the answers to the three preceding questions on your worksheet. (Note the lack of italics!)

Find the best normal distribution that matches the data you have collected.

Is there a problem with the solver solution to this problem? How can you find the solutions anyway?

Find the solutions anyway.

(Cautionin finding these solutions, what measure of accuracy should you be using? Do you have to consider small counts in any of your cells? How can you address this?)

Ensure you consider this in your solution.