May 2022 Student Simulation Competition - Contest Overview

Overview of Contest:

There are two ways to enter the Simio Student Case Competition. You can either enter directly or through class participation. This contest, we had 19 teams enter directly (44 students) and 31 instructors with 283 teams (1988 students) for a total of 302 teams (2032 students).

Summary of the Problem:

Simio Supply Logistics (SSL) is an organization that charters offshore vessels to and from various offshore drilling locations. SSL can choose from a variety of watercraft to rent monthly. The collection of platform supply vessels (PSVs) is selected and dispatched out of ports. These vessels service multiple deep-water rigs. The system is presently under scrutiny due to high costs, unmet demand, and excessive standby time. Management at SSL would like your team to improve vessel scheduling and determine a better way to meet the drilling company’s demands while minimizing incurred costs.

SSL is requesting an analysis of the current vessel operations. Using the historical data collected by the data management team, model the current system’s performance and fulfillment of cargo demand. The team will need to consider the specifications of different vessel types and capacity limitation for cargo as they plan which vessel is loaded and dispatched. Additionally, the North Sea, in which the rigs are located, can prove to be complex for sea-faring ships trying to pass through its waters. Factors such as wave height and general weather conditions greatly impact each vessel’s ability to transport its cargo from port to rig, and once at the rig, unload its contents. Modeling the current system will provide a baseline for evaluating improvement strategies for the future.

Management requests that your team develops and evaluates alternative business and procedure strategies. New strategies should decrease the overall operating cost while improving productivity and uptime. Your team will deliver a video presentation to SSL management with your findings and proposal for a future system.

Read the full problem!

Judging Criteria:

The judging was based on:

• Quality/clarity of the presentation
• Analysis/use of input data
• Modeling detail/approach
• Model internal documentation
• Verification and Validation
• Quality of animation
• Experimentation/exploration of alternatives
• Analysis of results
• Quality of the recommendations
• Overall project quality and Executive Summary

For more detail, see the Contest Judging Criteria.

Judging Panel:

Academic and Commercial:

Mardoqueo Velásquez Professor and Researcher at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala	Chris Tonn Simulation and Data Management Engineer at Spirit AeroSystems	Ivan Vilaboa Associate Professor at Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires	Linda Pichardo Profesor at Anáhuac Puebla
Matthew Nixon Digital Architect at Pollen Consulting Group is part of Argon & Co	Mustafa Gocken Associate Professor at Adana Alparslan Türkeş Science and Technology University	Michael Peters Digital Architect at Pollen Consulting Group is part of Argon & Co	Edward Williams Lecturer II at Business Analytics, College of Business, University of Michigan - Dearborn
Handre Dreyer Scheduling and Warehouse Solutions at SET	Raghavendra Kumar Senior Data Scientist at Eastman	Sven Guzman Dean of Business Engineer at ESEN

 

Simio LLC:

David Sturrock Technical Fellow	Elizabeth Millar Applications Engineer	Drew Rose Solutions Engineer
Caleb Whitehead Applications Engineer	Katy Ifkovits Applications Engineer	Devdatta Deo Project Engineer

May 2022 Contest Winners