When observing the output of a system simulation, how does one arrive at a reasonable number of observations needed to make an inference about that system?
I am observing widgets flowing through a manufacturing system and observing their wait times in queue and the queue length. The system is not modeled with an equation and distributions of observations are unknown. Ideally, one would like to be infer a distribution. If it were normal, then it would be helpful to estimate the mean & standard deviation from the 'sample' (observations). This begs the question, how many samples (model replications) will be performed.