There are two ways to enter the Simio Student Case Competition. You can either enter directly or through class participation. This year, we had 14 teams (29 students) and 10 instructors with 66 teams (226 students) for a total of 70 teams (255 students).
We also had representation from the following 10 countries:
The 255 students came from these 22 schools:
Simio Drilling Logistics (SDL) charters a number of offshore vessels to move material to and from various offshore drilling locations. The "as is" system dedicates a small number of vessels to service a set of offshore locations. Since the cost of an offshore rig going idle due to a lack of material is extremely high, SDL tends to procure vessels to meet maximum expectations to maximize drilling efficiency. Data indicates that there is much standby time at both ports and the offshore locations. SDL would like to improve vessel scheduling and potentially reduce the size of the offshore vessel fleet through operational improvements.
The first part of this problem is to model the "as-is" system with the current fleet of vessels dedicated to specific drilling locations. This model accounts for several different vessel types, and models the transport of a few different cargo items to the off shore rigs. The complexities of the system include the loading of the cargo onto the vessels and impact of weather and wave height on vessel transports and unloading. This "as-is" model will provide a baseline for evaluating improvement strategies for the system.
The second and most important part of this project is to develop and evaluate alternative strategies – such as pooling the vessels into a common fleet servicing all locations – to develop a "to-be" system that lowers the overall cost while maintaining the same high service levels. The project results will be judged both on the quality of the simulation models as well as the overall effectiveness/cost of the proposed "to-be" system.
This contest problem is loosely based on an actual transportation logistics problem at Shell Oil Company. We extend our thanks to Shell personnel for their help in problem formulation and judging. |
The judging was based on:
For more detail, see the Contest Judging Criteria.
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| Neal Hennegan Project Manager at Shell (USA) |
Prof. Carlos A. Méndez CAPSE-INTEC (UNL-CONICET) (Argentina) |
Adam Graunke Production Analytics at Boeing Research and Technology (USA) |
Idalia Flores De La Mota Head of Operations Research Department at National University of Mexico (Mexico) |
James W. Chrissis Air Force Institute of Technology |
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| Marlize Meyer
Senior Manager Simulation at Sasol (South Africa) |
Gary Kochenberger Professor of Business Analytics at University of Colorado at Denver (USA) |
Dusan Sormaz Assistant Director for Information Systems at Ohio University (USA) |
Dr. Mustafa GÖÇKEN Adana Science and Technology University (Turkey) |
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| Dr. C. Dennis Pegden Founder and Chief Executive Officer |
David Sturrock Vice President Operations |
Renee Thiesing Senior Applications Engineer |