December 2020 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 21 teams enter directly (44 students) and 48 instructors with 610 teams (2295 students) for a total of 631 teams (2339 students).

Summary of the Problem:

The Simio BBQ Smoke Pit is an up-and-coming local restaurant. It features a variety of BBQ smoked meats and classic sides. This makeshift cookout is nestled in an older, renovated building in a bustling downtown block. Due to size constraints, this is a carry-out only establishment. However, as Simio BBQ Smoke Pit continues to grow in popularity, customers are facing longer wait times due to product outages and a constrained labor force. To keep up with demand, the restaurant needs help determining what new policies to enact to resolve their service bottlenecks.

Due to the long smoking time required for the BBQ meats and lengthy cook time for some sides, the restaurant is struggling to keep a reasonable level of cooked food available. Having too little inventory will affect customer satisfaction. If food shortages occur too often, wait times could increase, causing customers to leave and losing potential business for the restaurant. On the other hand, creating excess inventory could accrue extra costs. The meat is expensive and excess uneaten food must be disposed of at the end of the day.

The challenge is to balance staffing and food production to maximize profits and customer satisfaction. The restaurant is looking to investigate customer arrivals and ordering patterns, resource requirements, and food production rates. Simio BBQ Smoke Pit desires the best strategy to replenish each of the different food items on their menu. This replenishment strategy not only affects when and how much food to cook, but also how to allocate the cooked portions between the meal assembly stations and the holding cabinets. Additionally, Simio BBQ would also like to know if the potential improvement of changing staffing levels or adding equipment would be worth the investment.

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:

Cassidy P. Shaffer Advanced Operations Research Analyst at Eastman Chemical Company (USA)	Mardoqueo Velasquez Faculty and Researcher at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (Guatemala)	Ed Williams Educator at University of Michigan (USA)	Iván Gonzalo Vilaboa Adjunct Professor at ITBA (Argentina)
Katy Smith Management Engineer III at Emory Healthcare (USA)	Mustafa Gocken Assistant Professor at Adana Science and Technology University (Turkey)	Stephanie Yeap Operations Research Analyst at Eastman Chemical Company (USA)

 

Simio LLC:

David Sturrock Vice President of Products	Elizabeth Millar Applications Engineer	Alex Molnar Applications Engineer	Rylan Carney Applications Engineer
Caleb Whitehead Applications Engineer	Paul Glasser Delivery Manager	Ryan Welch Luttrell Product Engineer

December 2020 Contest Winners