Littlefield technologies (OpsSimCom 2011)

In April I joined a Spanish team to participate in the OpsSimCom 2011 competition. This an online, real time simulation of a factory that we used before in Operation Management class to grasp arcane concepts as inventory control, queue management, system capacity and takt time. In the competition you are given an initial configuration of machines and a forecast of the demand for your product and you need to manage the factory to get the maximum profit (No sustainability issues here) at the end of 1 simulated year.

Littlefield simulator factory

The simulation run online updates every 20 minutes for 4 real days. Every 20 minutes in real time advances one complete day in simulation day. It better to study the factory and the demand and predict when you will need to take decisions so you don’t need to be all day checking the status of the factory. The decisions you can take are the acquisition of more machines (capacity), change how your product flow in your factory (balance capacity), and buying raw materials (reorder points).

Once with the initial data in our hands, we calculated an strategy and stuck to it till the very end. One problem with the OpsSimCom simulation is that the user interface is really slow and the data is dispersed in many different places. To overcome this limitation I developed several scripts to collect all the available data, display it together in a table and graph real time charts of the situation of the factory.

This is how my data collector look like

Monitoring the simulation comfortably on the TV

Even if the simulation is simple, there are many variables and it is very difficult to create a model for maximum profit. Our proved to be correct because we followed the path of the leading teams but we failed miserabily on the implementation, accidentaly buying raw materials we didn’t need and taking too much time to buy extra capacity at mid game. We finally finished on the position 22 out of 140. Ouch!

We collected the standing data during the last 180 days of the competition and created graphs displaying the progression of the different teams. You can download a complete set of charts in high resolution (SVG and PNG files, 30M) and also download an XLS file with the partial financial standing data (The collector missed to get some data points around day 225)

Chart of partial results of the simulation with the top5 teams highlighted.

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