TOPIC: Monte Carlo Simulation or DOE question

One of a premier satellite launch research organization on this planet had planned to send a satellite to Mars for the discovery of life forms on the planet Mars. In order to launch the satellite, the organization intended to precisely track its space position with one of the approaches. Which approach would you BEST believe to serve this purpose on this project?

1. Monte Carlo Simulation
2. Design of Experiments
3. Attribute Sampling
4. Data Gathering and Representation Techniques

This was an question which was shared by one of my team mates. Please help me understand what would be the correct answer to this question.

Many thanks in advance.

the question is not giving so much clues to answer. but if I faced such question in the exam, I would start by eliminating Answers 3 and 4 and would select between "Monte Carlo Simulation" and "Design of Experiments" with more preference(80%) to "Design of Experiments".

Thanks Ahmed - The correct answer is supposed to be DOE, however Monte Carlo Simulation also makes a reasonable choice as you suggested.

I think the key statement lies in " In order to launch the satellite, the organization intended to precisely track its space position with one of the approaches." This tells us that the goal of the project is to ultimately discover life forms on Mars. This can't happen without a successful launch, and this is stated to be achieved by "precisely track its space position".

I would narrow down to #1 and #2, but Design of Experiments would give the greatest chance to practically apply and succeed at a launch.

I agree with Jeremy that I would quickly narrow it down to #1 or #2. If you think about #1 further, however, you realize that Monte Carlo simulations are a way of statistically making predictions. So they would be a decent way of predicting the most likely way the launch would go, and the most probable path of the satellite once it was launched. But it is not "precisely tracking the position". It is a way of predicting things before they happen, but things are not guaranteed to turn out that way.

So if you eliminate 1,3, and 4, then the answer logically must be #2!

DOE is a costly option but provides data. Monte Carlo is to find out the probability for range of possibilities therefore in this case where all other possibilities can be considered as failure and only one possibility as success monte carlo will not be effective

If the question was not about was not a space ship (indicating a very high cost of failure) and if there were many possibilities monte carlo would have been good option but then again we would not have been able to rule out DOE

Therefore the question is definitely leading us onto DOE