For Immediate Release posted on May 29, 2015
Sewickley, PA – May 29, 2015. Simio is excited to announce the winners of the May 2015 Student Case Competition. JacketSim consisting of Dennis Siedlak and Paul Schlais from Georgia Institute of Technology placed first out of 70 teams. Tiger Simulation from Rochester Institute of Technology with members Derek Kreider and Jacob Klaus came in 2nd. Rounding out the top 3 was SmartDrill with Jorge Figal and Ignacio from Delft University of Technology.
Simio had a total of 255 students participate in the competition. These students came from 22 schools throughout 10 countries. 
These competitions will not only challenge student model-building skills, but also require some creativity, project management, and even video production and presentation skills. This semester’s competition problem was loosely based off an actual transportation logistics problem at Shell Oil Company. The Summary of the problem is:
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.
Simio will announce the next semester’s student competition in July 2015. For more information and to view the top 9 presentations, visit the May 2015 Student Competition Overview.