December 2018 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 25 teams enter directly (78 students) and 28 instructors with 275 teams (986 students) for a total of 300 teams (1064 students).

Summary of the Problem:

Seed production process spans various activities including: planting a given hybrid in the field, in-season operations, harvesting, and seed processing in the manufacturing facilities. In North America, the harvest season lasts for about 8-10 weeks starting middle to late Aug until early to middle of Oct each year. A set of fields is assigned to a manufacturing site for seed processing and packaging after the harvest is completed. The seed production facilities operate from mid – Sept until March/April time for the following year.

Given that Bayer operates several seed production facilities with different product mix, the planning function at Bayer needs determine the production plan for each of these facilities keeping into account constraints such as product portfolio, complex bill of material, product routing through the facility, physical space and material handling systems, equipment configuration & efficiency and workforce constraints among other items to ensure right seed is shipped to the right customer at the right time.

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:

Jennifer Becker Optimization Lead at Bayer Crop Sciences (USA)	Yao Nie Data Scientist – Simulation at Bayer (USA)	Kaike Zhang Data Scientist – Operations Research at Bayer (USA)	Shrikant Jarugumilli Operations Research & Simulation Lead at Bayer (USA)
Raul Zuniga PHd at Universidad Arturo Prat (Chile)	Laura Silvoy Senior Associate at Array Advisors (USA)	Ernest Bhero Advocate of the High Court of South Africa & a Professional Engineer at University of KwaZulu Natal (South Africa)	Mustafa Gocken Assistant Professor at Adana Science and Technology University (Turkey)
Olivia Pewzer Advanced Simulation Specialist at HDR (USA)	Paolo Renna Professor in Manufacturing and Production Systems at University of Basilicata (Italy)	Enrique Romero Professor at Escuela Colombiana de Ingenieria (Colombia)	Meredith Deneweth Senior Manager Solutions Design at Ryder Integrated Logistics (USA)

Simio LLC:

Dr. C. Dennis Pegden Founder and CEO	David Sturrock VP of Operations	Christine Watson Senior Application Engineer
Devdatta Deo Applications Engineer	Alex Molnar Application Engineer