The final day of WinterSim

With WinterSim now over for another year, Tony Waller shares his highlights from the final day

Today I chaired a Business Process Modeling session at the conference. Two quite different presentations. One from Professor Kristina Jespersen, of Aarhus University in Denmark, a very advanced analysis of how different types of companies, with different types of innovation linkage develop competitive advantages – interesting to see some almost unexpected results, with high innovation in some cases being counterproductive. Kristina and I are pictured below.

The other presentation in my session was by Soumyadip Ghosh of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, exploring the creation of mathematical approximations of simulation models that enable faster optimization to give the full simulation model a great starting point for heuristic search. Particularly interesting to me was the use of the model to calibrate parameters in the simpler model to make it sufficiently accurate to help with the overall solution. This type of research into fast optimization is surely key in a world where many processes are mathematically very complex.

Today also it was good to catch up with other friends from the UK Universities and also PJ Byrne from Dublin City University driving use of simulation towards smaller companies (SME’s).

Now time to pack up and catch the plane back!