Keynotes

Ann Dunkin

Chief Information Officer, U.S. Department of Energy

2023 WSC Keynote Speaker

Modeling for Energy Resilience: How DOE Uses Simulation to Model and Manage Everything from the Power Grid to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

The U.S. Department of Energy’s responsibilities run the gamut from managing the nuclear stockpile and the strategic petroleum reserve to running the power grid in 36 states to performing basic and applied research to protect national security, ensure stable power sector operations and accelerate the clean energy transition. Leveraging the power of DOE’s computing infrastructure, including the world’s fastest supercomputer, simulation models are used to accelerate advancements in nearly every field of research across DOE. Through a series of examples highlighting grid management, cybersecurity, cavern modeling and fundamental physical phenomena, this keynote will illuminate how DOE applies modeling and simulation to both research and operations.

Bio

Ann Dunkin currently serves as Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy, where she manages the Department’s information technology (IT) portfolio and modernization; oversees the Department’s cybersecurity efforts; and leads tech innovation at DOE. She served in the Obama Administration as CIO of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prior roles include chief strategy and innovation officer, Dell Technologies; CIO, County of Santa Clara, CA; CTO, Palo Alto Unified School District, California; and various leadership roles at Hewlett Packard focused on engineering, research and development, IT, manufacturing engineering, software quality and operations.

Ann is a published author, most recently of the book Industrial Digital Transformation, and a speaker on the topics of government technology modernization, digital transformation and organizational development. She was named in ComputerWorld’s Premier 100 Technology Leaders for 2016, DC’s Top 50 Women in Technology for 2015 and 2016 and StateScoop’s Top 50 Women in Technology list for 2017. In 2018, she was inducted into Georgia Tech’s Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni.

2023 Titans of Simulation

John Fowler

Motorola Professor of Supply Chain Management
W.P. Carey School of Business
Arizona State University

Resilience of Supply Chains and the Role of Simulation

Supply chain resilience refers to the capacity of a supply chain to proactively prepare for unforeseen events, effectively address disruptions, and bounce back from them while ensuring the sustained smooth operation of the supply chain at the preferred level of connectivity and management of its structure and functions. Recent disruptive events including the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have caused an increased emphasis on supply chain resilience. In this presentation, we discuss strategies to prepare for, address, and bounce back from (potential) disruptions and the role that simulation can play in enhancing supply chain resilience.

Bio

John Fowler is the Motorola Professor of Supply Chain Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He served as the department chair of supply chain management from 2011-2016. Prior to that he was the Avnet Professor of Industrial Engineering at ASU. His research interests include discrete event simulation, deterministic scheduling, and multi-criteria decision making. He has published more than 120 journal articles and more than 100 conference papers. Professor Fowler recently served as editor-in-chief for IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering and continues to be the department editor for Healthcare Operations Management at the journal. He is an editor of the Journal of Simulation and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing. He is a fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and recently served as the vice president for continuing education. He is a former INFORMS vice president and served on the Winter Simulation Conference board of directors from 2005-2017. He was also the program chair for the 2002 and 2008 Industrial Engineering Research Conferences and the 2008 Winter Simulation Conference.

Enver Yücesan

Professor of Information Management
INSEAD

Ensuring Food Security under Climate Change: How Simulation Can Help in Making Agricultural Supply Chains More Resilient

Climate change and the resulting increased frequency of unpredictable extreme weather events create new operational challenges for the commercial seed industry, which is a key pillar of a sustainable and secure global food supply. More specifically, extreme weather events translate into two main effects on agricultural production: higher yield variability and lower expected yields. In recent years, extreme weather events already caused reductions in the yields of cereals, maize, and other staple crops. It is also projected that a warming of +2C (+4C) would increase the coefficient of variation of corn yield by 62% (192%) in six countries that collectively account for 73% of global production. In this presentation, we first examine how the increased likelihood of extreme weather events affects agricultural supply chains in terms of R&D, production planning, contracting, allocation, and storage decisions. We then discuss the key challenges associated with each stage and highlight how simulation can help address them under increased volatility.

Bio

Enver Yücesan holds the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank Chair in International Management in the Technology and Operations Management Area at INSEAD. He is an Industrial Engineer from Purdue University with a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University. His research is at the interface of simulation, optimization, and statistics. More specifically, he focuses on complementing the modelling power of computer simulation with efficient analysis methodologies to study the dynamic behaviour of complex systems such as supply chains and social networks, which, in turn, enables robust design and effective management of these ecosystems. More recently, he has been focusing on agricultural supply chains to address key challenges such as identification of robust parent seeds, farmer contracting, small holder management, and production and inventory planning under increasing volatility driven by population dynamics and climate change. Over the past three decades, he has also been actively serving the simulation community at large in various editorial and administrative positions; in recognition of his contributions, the INFORMS Simulation Society recently presented Enver with its Distinguished Service Award. He is currently serving as one of the Department Editors in the Supply Chain & Logistics focused issue of IISE Transactions. He has recently been elected as a INFORMS Fellow.

MASM Keynote

Hans Ehm

Senior Principal Supply Chain
Infineon Technologies AG

Simulation, Optimization and AI for Semiconductor Manufacturing and Supply Chains:
Four Decades of Progress and a Vision for the Future

Semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain processes are one of the most complex but can be considered at the same time also as one of the most rewarding processes in the world. In thousands of detailed unit chemical and physical processes in cleanrooms and under statistical process control chips on wafers emerge and are assembled and tested to components. The Modeling and Analysis of Semiconductor Manufacturing (MASM) conference embedded in the annual Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) was, is, and will be key to understand the optimization and simulation challenges in this domain.

The operating curve management targeting a low variability value and thus enabling a low flow factor – thus speed – and high utilization – thus a good cost position – at the same time has been an early achievement. With discrete-event, agent based, and system dynamic simulations on the four levels (machine, fab, internal and external supply chain) solution options for complex interactions could be proposed based on sophisticated mathematical models running on simulation testbeds like the MIMAC models and their successors. Accurate planning and advanced scheduling, available to promise (ATP) generation and usage with traditional or artificial intelligence (AI) / deep learning (DL) methods requires a huge amount of real data or qualified synthetic data (QSD).

The semantic web for semiconductor and supply chain containing semiconductors bears the potential to enable the provision of those urgently needed QSD in volume, (integrated) complexity and accuracy needed. Quantum bit (qubit) based algorithm could provide the speed for the next and over-next generation for optimization and simulation in our domain.

Bio

Hans Ehm is Senior Principal Supply Chain of Infineon Technologies AG and there responsible for Supply Chain Innovations. He holds degrees in Physics (Dipl. Ing (FH) HS Munich) from Germany and a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Oregon State University/ USA.

In his almost 40 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, he was granted managing and consulting positions at wafer fabrication, assembly & test, and global supply chains. He publishes his work see google scholar or the Ehm’s lab on Research Gate.

Hans was at the Supervisory Board of camLine Holding AG, an IT company providing software for supply and quality chains for over ten years until 2020. He was chairman of the European Leadership Team of the Supply Chain Council and is a past Board Member of APICS SCC. He leads the working group (Arbeitskreis) SCM of the ZVEI. He is active in several EU projects like SC³ – semantically connected semiconductor supply chains.

Hans teaches Supply Chain Management at Universities and initiates innovative academic curriculums. In 2015, he was awarded with the renowned LEO-Award (Logistics Excellence Optimisation) in the category “Manager” from DVZ Media Group. SCM Movement listed him as one of the 10 most influential SCM Managers in the DACH region 2018.

Hans played a initiating role for the MASM conference in initiating together with John Fowler the MIMAC studies in a US (Sematech)/EU )(Jessi) collaboration in 1995. Together with John Fowler, Lars Mönch, and Chen Fu-Chien he is one of the Dagstuhl seminar organizers on planning and control approaches for semiconductor supply chains.

Military Keynote

Imre Balogh

Research Associate Professor and Director, MOVES Institute
Naval Postgraduate School, New Mexico State University

Creating Live Virtual Constructive Environments to Evaluate Human and System Resilience

Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) exercises are becoming ubiquitous for training and mission rehearsal in the Military domain because the use of LVC provides the most realistic environment available short of actual military operations. The mixture of live exercises with simulated components (constructive simulations and virtual simulators) allows for the creation of a context for the training or rehearsal that is richer and more representative of the real world than would be possible with only live events. This ability to embed live activity into synthetic environment to provide realism has attracted the interest of the Test and Evaluation community (T&E) and recently there are increasing efforts to start including LVC in the T&E tool suite. I’ll discuss some of the work we have been doing at the Naval Postgraduate School with LVC and look at how these environments can be used to assess and improve system and human resilience in operational environments.

Bio

Dr. Balogh had been the Director of the MOVES Institute at NPS since 2014. The MOVES Institute is a research element of NPS focusing on the science and technology driving the development and novel application of M&S tools as is applicable to the Navy and DOD and the international M&S community. The work done at MOVES has a wide range of customers that includes Training, Analysis, Operational Planning, Design Methodology, Acquisition, and other communities where M&S can provide a competitive advantage.

Dr. Balogh has twenty-nine years of experience working on Combat simulations. He was the Chief Architect and technical lead of COMBATXXI development team for seven years. COMBATXXI is a closed-form, high resolution combat simulation and is the primary analytical simulation used for analysis of the joint battlespace by the US Army and Marine Corps to support acquisition and future needs assessments.

Dr. Balogh has been leading research projects at MOVES for over 13 years. These projects range from the development of Combat simulations, creation of tools for modeling decision making processes, network interoperability and the use of augmented reality techniques in operational setting.