Message from the President
By: Rick Haberlin
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Dear M&S Division Members,
I hope that many of you were able to participate in the Annual Conference this past spring. As always, I was glad for the opportunity to reconnect with friends and colleagues, and to make new connections as well. We had a great turnout at our Town Hall meeting, and we had fifteen sessions of engaging talks on cutting-edge M&S research and applications in a variety of domains, including infrastructure, healthcare, transportation, supply chain, manufacturing, and agent-based modeling. Thank you to everyone who participated!
Special thanks to our 2023 M&S track chairs: Raed Jaradat, Casey Canfield, and Dave Claudio. We appreciate all of your efforts in making a successful track possible, including: performing abstract and paper reviews, scheduling panels and talks, and coordinating with authors, presenters, and session chairs. As an M&S member, if you are interested in serving as a paper reviewer for future conferences, let us know. Serving as a reviewer gives you the opportunity to share your own M&S expertise to provide valuable feedback to authors, and our track chairs would appreciate your support.
Our M&S track chairs have released the call for abstracts for our IISE 2024 Annual Conference, which will be held May 18-21 in Montreal.
This newsletter contains:
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- M&S Leadership for 2024
- 2023 Awards - M&S Teaching, M&S Practitioner, Best Track Paper, and Best Student Paper
- 2024 IISE Annual Conference and Expo
- IISE M&S Podcast: The Use of Digital Twins in Modeling and Simulation
- Industry Spotlight: Joan Tafoya, Director of Global Operations, Meta
- Research Spotlight: Eunhye Song, Coca-Cola Foundation Early Career Professor & Assistant Professor
- Call for Entries to the Division Newsletter and Social Media
- Join the M&S Division!
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Regarding that last point: Don’t be a stranger! If you’re interested in M&S, we would love to have you join our Division. You can also follow the M&S Division on LinkedIn, which is a great way to communicate with the Board and to network with other like-minded modelers.
Best regards,
Rick Haberlin
IISE M&S Division President
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M&S Division Board Members |
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Shima Mohebbi
President-Elect
2023-2024
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Richard Haberlin
President
2023-2024
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John Shortle
Past President
2023-2024
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Greg Zerr
Director
2023-2025
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Chris Tonn
Director
2023-2025
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Casey Canfield
Director
2023-2025
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Tarun Gupta
Director
2023-2025
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Kelley Mullick
Director
2022-2024
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David Claudio
Director
2022-2024
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Prashanth Rajivan
Director
2022-2024
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Raed Jaradat
Director
2022-2024
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Isaac Mitchell
Technical Vice-President
2021-2024
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2023 Awards
(contributed by Allen Greenwood)
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The IISE M&S Division presented four awards to recognize excellence in research and teaching within our modeling and simulation domain. These awards were presented at the Division’s Town Hall meeting at the IISE Annual Conference in May.
The Division would like to thank this year's Director of Awards, Dr. Allen Greenwood, for overseeing the award process and obtaining financial sponsors. The Division would also like to thank the board members for helping in the review and evaluation process. We would also like to thank our sponsors for their financial support - FlexSim Software Products, Inc. (www.flexsim.com) for sponsoring the Annual Teaching Award and the Outstanding Practitioner Award and Simio LLC (www.simio.com) for sponsoring the Best Track Paper Award and the Best Student Paper Award. Each award received a $750 stipend, except the Best Student Paper received $1,000.
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- Dr. Sara Shashaani from the Edwin P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University received this year's Annual Teaching Award.
- Travis Hill from the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems Extension at Mississippi State University received this year's Outstanding Practitioner Award.
- Dr. Shima Mohebbi, Babak Aslani, and Mark Herman Dsouza from George Mason University won the Division’s Best Track Paper Award for their paper entitled "A New Graph-empowered Agent-based Simulation to Assess the Impact of Coordination Schemes on Infrastructure Networks Resilience.”
- Yuxin Yang and Mohammad Sa’eed AlAttar from Binghampton University received this year’s Best Student Paper Award for their paper entitled "Multi-Objective Surgery Scheduling Optimization Based on Simulation Modeling and Heuristic Algorithm."
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Congratulations to all our winners! Dr. Tarun Gupta will be the Director of Awards for the upcoming year. |
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2024 IISE Annual Conference and Expo
(contributed by the M&S Track Chairs)
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The Modeling & Simulation (M&S) Division of the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE) is sponsoring the M&S Track at the IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2024. The conference is a forum for exchanging knowledge and discoveries in the Industrial and Systems Engineering research and practitioner communities. The IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2024 will continue to integrate research and industry applications under one conference.
As Track Chairs of the M&S Track, we encourage you to contribute to the Conference and Track by submitting a 250-word abstract or presentation summary. Authors will be able to claim these works as refereed extended abstracts, which will be available on the conference website and can be cited. They will not be copyrighted or indexed in the official conference proceedings, and therefore there is no limitation on reusing this material for other purposes (e.g., toward the publication of journal papers or subsequent conference proceedings). We highly encourage Abstracts and Presentations Summaries that demonstrate international collaboration and the application of emerging technologies and methods. Key areas include:
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- Methodological advances (e.g., agent-based simulation, simulation optimization, input and output analysis, hybrid simulation, machine learning, augmented simulation, etc.)
- Simulation applications (e.g., cybersecurity, defense and military, emergency preparedness, energy, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, risk modeling, transportation, etc.)
- Digital twins
- Modeling in decision support system
- Human factors and human-computer interaction
- Virtual reality and training
- Simulation education
- Industry 4.0 models
- Modeling and Machine/deep learning
- Process modeling
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December 22, 2023
- Notification of decision on abstract/presentation summary
February 9, 2024
- Paper submission deadline
March 8, 2024
- Notification on full paper decision
March 22, 2024
- Speaker registration deadline
- Paper final revision submission deadline
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Modeling & Simulation Track Chairs:
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IISE Podcast: The Use of Digital Twins in Modeling and Simulation |
This episode featured members of IISE’s Modeling & Simulation Division. Andrew Collins, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at Old Dominion University, discusses with George Mason University faculty members Prof. Jie Xu and Prof. Chun-Hung Chen the growing use of digital twin modeling, which applies data to reflect what is happening in real time and serve as a predictive tool for physical systems. |
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Joan Tafoya is currently Director of Global Operations, leading a team to bring operational efficiencies to all of Meta’s datacenters, worldwide. She and her team are responsible for driving improvements in the way we operate our data centers to bring Meta’s products to our billions of users across the globe. Prior to Meta, Joan was the Director of Enterprise Excellence at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. In her role, Joan was responsible for overseeing the design, development, and execution of the continuous improvement strategy and leading the Labs’ quality and assurance improvement strategy and implementation plans. Joan spent most of her career at Intel Corporation where she retired after nearly 30 years, holding senior leadership positions in manufacturing, supply chain, and new business segments. Her time at Intel included multi-year expat assignments in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Germany.
Joan is a strong advocate of women in STEM fields. As an example of her advocacy, the Society of Women Engineers recognized Joan with the Global Leader Award, citing: “For making a lasting impact by changing paradigms for global semiconductor supply planning and for serving as a role model for women and minority engineers worldwide.”. For her outstanding contributions to her field, she is an appointed Fellow of IISE. Joan currently serves on the Albuquerque Regional Economic Alliance Board. She has served on the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce Board for 6 years. Joan was recognized as a Woman of Influence by Albuquerque Business First in the technology category.
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What do you work on?
As Director of Global Operations, I am leading a team to bring increased operational efficiencies and value to all of Meta’s data centers, worldwide. My team is responsible for building resilient and agile practices around capacity planning and delivery, maintenance practices, program management, and business operations leveraging operational analytics and continuous improvement methodologies.
How can your research be applied to another field?
The core of the work I do is all about Operational Excellence. It really doesn’t matter if I’m working in data centers, a manufacturing line, or with a research and development group. The foundational questions and work are all the same. Moreover, I believe that each person’s core job, no matter the field, is to solve a problem. With that in mind, the questions that drive me are:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- How does solving this problem connect with the organization’s larger goals?
- Given the limited resources we have (time, money, people), does solving this problem preempt the work we already have in flight? This question assumes that resources are free and available for use.
- What knowledge do we have and where are our knowledge gaps? And since nearly all work occurs via a process, I often find myself asking:
- Do we have a standard workflow in place to get our work done?
- Is the standard workflow documented with clear steps to let you know along
the way we are performing the work correctly?
- Are we actively practicing the scientific method by developing hypotheses to test with experiments?
Throughout my career and across many roles, answering these questions rigorously and systematically have served me well.
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What suggestions do you have for other researchers to join this accelerating field of machine learning?
By machine learning, I’m assuming you mean the latest AI breakthroughs we are seeing with generative AI and large language models (LLMs). LLMs are just another tool, similar to a simulation program, a statistical analysis software package, and a CnC machine. My suggestion is simple – use it! Not only are they fun to explore, the mere process of using the tools will help you clarify your thinking and focus your narrative.
Learn more about the new field emerging called “prompt engineering”. Personally, I believe we all need to get better at asking questions of our LLMs. To be effective at getting the most out of it, you will need to define problem statements or specific asks clearly and with a good amount of detail. Moreover, brevity is not necessarily your friend with LLM; striving for clarity and preciseness will benefit you.
Think about engagements with LLMs as a conversation, further exploring to greater levels of detail. Skip the idioms and the assumptions, which can be hard because they are so embedded in our day-to-day language. Rather than typing a query such as “tell me about the best things to do in Boston”, structure your prompt with more detail. “My husband and I are going to visit Boston for 3 days and enjoy trying unique foods in small diners. He isn’t able to walk more than 10-15 minutes at a time, but we are interested in learning about the history of the area. We enjoy learning about the architecture of the area and different building styles. What would you suggest as must do items for our trip?” If you are really interested in written output, get to know writing styles. For instance, in the above example, you could say, “provide a travel itinerary in Old English form.”
Finally, consider today’s AI as a “co-pilot”. Don’t take everything it says as firm. Rather, have enough domain knowledge to confirm what it is saying is relevant and truthful.
How do you use your Industrial and Systems engineering in your day-to-day career?
ISE is all about the integration of people, process, technology, and systems. My belief is that people that gravitate to ISE have a superpower in the systems front – pulling these components together to deliver increased value for the organization. I have seen the most technologically advanced products fail because the developers never really considered the people aspects. Moreover, I have seen the organizations with the smartest people not be able to deliver value, again, because the important interactions needed (hearing all voices, great facilitation of work, a disagree and commit mindset and more) are not born out.
Applying systems thinking with a highly curious mindset and structured, systematic approaches is what ISE is all about. I attribute my success and ability to move from manufacturing to supply chain, to new business development, to R&D, to data center operations because the core ISE skills and knowledge applied in all cases.
Can you provide any open access resources for our readers?
To learn more about prompt engineering, just Google for the many courses and resources that are available. It is an exploding capability that we all must learn. Regarding Meta’s data centers, learn about those here. Moreover, in the spirit of sharing knowledge, we are also very involved in the Open Compute Project (OCP).
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Dr. Eunhye Song
Eunhye Song is a Coca-Cola Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.
What do you work on?
I work on the analysis methodology for stochastic simulation. That means, if someone gives me a simulator that serves a decision-making purpose, my research aim is to help design the simulation experiment to correctly achieve them in the most efficient way possible. For instance, the decision-maker may want to estimate the expected aggregate sales revenue of a new portfolio of products by simulating the consumer preferences in the market. What I mean by correctness is that there is a statistical guarantee (95% chance, for instance) that the resulting decisions made from the experiment indeed achieve the intended purposes. The efficiency can be measured by the computation time and/or the amount of data required to reach the conclusion; the less the better.
How can your research be applied to another field?
While my research focuses on building general-purpose theories, I have been enjoying working with various application experts in product design, manufacturing, healthcare and more to help them make robust decisions using simulation. For instance, I recently started collaborating with a colleague who works on building a simulation-based digital twin for modular construction manufacturing. There are many open simulation research questions in this domain spanning model validation/calibration, online optimization and making the best use of high-performance computing. I am looking forward to discovering how simulation theories can help fast and robust decision-making for digital twins.
What suggestions do you have for other researchers to join this accelerating field of simulation analysis methodology?
As in many fields, the leap in computing power and data collection/processing capabilities have brought exciting new research questions to the field. That is, we are capable of building and executing a much more complex simulator. Many models relying on simplifying assumptions can now be replaced by data-driven simulations. This means we need new analysis methods that can process nonstationary, high-dimensional simulation data and new algorithms that effectively exploit parallel computing to solve large-scale optimization problems. Since simulation is so ubiquitous, the impact of good methodological research spans beyond the field. If one is interested in tackling these challenges, I would say this is an exciting time to join. To be exposed to the state-of-the-art research questions, I highly recommend checking out the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) proceedings archived at https://informs-sim.org/. There are several tracks including Analysis Methodology and Simulation Optimization that present the most recent research questions and results.
At this time, many authors upload their manuscripts online before publication decisions are made. If you find some conference proceedings that interest you on the WSC archive (open access, by the way) I mentioned above, then it is very likely that you can find a journal version of the same paper on some online archive free of charge.
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Call for Entries to the Division's Newsletter and Social Media |
The Division is publishing its newsletters and hereby soliciting news entries. We would also like to feature the accomplishments of IISE M&S Division Members in our LinkedIn group. This is a great opportunity to showcase interesting and impactful research, professional practice, and educational efforts within the Division. The solicited story will go into the following blocks in the newsletter: Research on the News, Practical Applications, and Education and Outreach. It would be great if you could:
(1) Prepare your story write-up within 200 words (write it in plain language for diverse audiences)
(2) Provide a nice picture together with the story
(3) Provide a link (if possible) to a detail version of the story (hyperlink to your project public webpage, etc.).
Please email your information and materials to Dr. Greg Zerr (gzerr@marathonpetroleum.com) and your entry will appear in the next available division newsletter and LinkedIn group.
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How to Join the M&S Division |
You can connect with us via the following:
Membership is free for all IISE members. To update your membership record,
Join our LinkedIn group to stay updated. Search for IISE Modeling and Simulation Division or click here.
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Have you considered a corporate membership? If not, why? Companies large and small enjoy the benefits. Include your entire team and receive all the benefits of individual membership, plus lowest rates to attend the Conferences and much more.
Contact Doug Long IISE Global Director for Strategic Alliances for more details. |
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