This paper proposes a strategy for the global sensitivity analysis in the flowsheet simulation on solid processes which allows to examine and quantify the influences of given parameters on specific target criteria. The strategy is basically divided into two parts: The first is the effect analysis which provides the range of possible values of a target variable. This permits an estimation of the accuracy of a simulation with uncertain parameters. As the second part the influence analysis builds a hierarchy of the different uncertain parameters according to their impacts on a specific target criterion. This latter information can be used to decrease the efforts for parameter estimation in a given process simulation by focussing the efforts on the most influential parameters. The strategy for global sensitivity analysis suggested here is applied to a soil washing process where an oil-contaminated soil is to be cleaned such that both the amount of the contaminant concentrate to be disposed and the residual oil contamination of the cleaned soil are to be minimized. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.