I DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A I Approved for public release; Distribution Unlimited C.,

his paper proposes a rule for determining when to start collecting ~ data in a queueing simulation. The rule is designed to reduce depen-dence between the empty (queue) and idle (servers) initial conditions and the collec ted sample record. The rule is an outgrowth of earl ier work by Fishman and Moore (1978) and relies on a comparison between a priori information on the activity l evel (traffic intensity) and a corresponding sample estimate computed during the course of simulation. Experiments with simulations of the MIMIc queue with c = 1,2,4 and p =.7,.8,.9,.95 reveal that the rul e reduces and in most cases removes the dependence on the empty and idle initial conditions. In particular, the rule begins data collection when the simulation is in a congested state or in the steady state. The rule is wel l behaved in that it has low probabiliti es of requiring long runs before data collection is started. Al though ou