Keynotes

2024 WSC Keynote Simulation for Disney Parks and Experiences

At Disney, simulation is used to analyze a variety of stages and aspects of the guest’s vacation experience. Before the first guest rides a new theme park attraction, Disney works behind the scenes to build detailed simulation models that inform design decisions. In this presentation, we will discuss analytics utilized by Disney in the design, development, and maintenance of attractions and transportation systems—including component-level and system-level simulations of the dynamics of ride vehicles and animatronics. In a broader commercial context, we will also discuss the role of simulation in analytics applications supporting business decision making for Disney Experiences.

Brian Walters

Senior Manager, Modeling, Simulation, and Training Tools, Disney Experiences

Bio

Brian Walters, PE, is Senior Manager of Modeling, Simulation, and Training Tools within the Global Engineering and Technology team at Disney Experiences. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, he got his start at Disney on the Instrumentation Support team, providing attraction testing and data acquisition services. He spent ten years as a Sustaining Controls Engineer, improving attraction reliability for all rides at the Magic Kingdom and leading the adoption of new data acquisition and analytics technologies. As part of Modeling, Simulation, and Training Tools, he has spent the last ten years leading a team that develops simulation, training, data acquisition, and analytics tools for Disney parks worldwide. One of his focus areas is collaborating on the organization’s Scientific Data Analytics initiative involving digital twins and attractions predictive maintenance. Some of Brian’s past projects include developing digital recorders for elephant vocalization research at Animal Kingdom and building an instrumentation pack for measuring g-forces on attractions. He was part of the opening team for Mission: SPACE at EPCOT and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Brian graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science in Engineering Management.

Amy Sardeshmukh

Director, Yield Optimization,
Disney Experiences

Bio

Amy Sardeshmukh is Director of Yield Optimization within the Walt Disney World Commercial Strategy team at Disney Experiences. Prior to starting her current position in 2024, Amy worked for sixteen years in roles of increasing responsibility on the Industrial Engineering team at Walt Disney World, ultimately leading teams of internal consultants who translate data into key insights for business leaders to drive continuous improvement and operations strategy. She has supported operations serving Guests of Walt Disney World at every stage of their visit, including attractions, transportation, food and beverage, merchandise, resorts, pre-arrival, and back of house. She also contributed to several theme park land designs including Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Toy Story Land, and Fantasyland. Prior to starting as an Associate Industrial Engineer in 2008, Amy completed her Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, while also completing five semesters of internships in Industrial Engineering at Disney. She also holds a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Central Florida.

Frederick Zahrn

Director, Decision Science Transformation,
The Walt Disney Company

Bio

Frederick Zahrn is a Director of Decision Science Transformation within Disney Decision Science & Integration (DDSI). DDSI is a centralized team that maximizes the business performance of The Walt Disney Company by advancing a culture of applied decision science. Fred leads a team working to identify the best methodologies for business analytics and to promote their use in support of business decisions across the Company. His team produces prototypes and pilots in technical domains including optimization, causal inference, simulation, machine learning, statistics, and decision analysis. His project experience includes support for a variety of lines of business including theme parks, resort hotels, vacation ownership, cruise line, musical theatre, consumer products, and media networks. He has supported business functions including revenue management, marketing, sales, finance, supply chain, real estate, and public affairs. Prior to starting his Disney career in 2010 as an Operations Research Analyst, Fred completed his Master of Science in Operations Research and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech.

2024 Titans of Simulation

Sally Brailsford

Professor in Management
Southampton Business School
University of Southampton

In Praise of Small Models

Over the course of Sally’s 35-year academic career simulation models have got bigger and bigger, due to the exponential growth in computing power and the increased availability of large datasets. This trend has culminated in the current popularity of so-called ‘digital twins’. The scientific definition of a digital twin is open to debate, but according to Wikipedia a digital twin is ‘a digital model of an intended or actual real-world physical product, system, or process that serves as the effectively indistinguishable digital counterpart of it for practical purposes’. In this talk she’ll challenge the usefulness (indeed, the point) of such massive models and argue that based on her experience, small models can often be far more impactful in practice.

Bio

Sally Brailsford obtained a BSc in Mathematics from Kings College London in 1973 but then worked for many years in the UK National Health Service as a nurse. Her academic career began in the late 1980s, when she obtained an MSc and then a PhD in Operations Research from the University of Southampton, UK. She has worked at Southampton ever since, mainly in the areas of discrete-event simulation and system dynamics. She has applied both approaches to a wide variety of healthcare-related issues, both for specific conditions and to improve care delivery systems. Her methodological research interests include hybrid simulation and methods for incorporating human behavior in simulation models.

From 2010-19 Sally was chair of the EURO Working Group on OR Applied to Health Services (ORAHS) and a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Health Systems. She is the only three-time winner of the UK OR Society’s Goodeve Medal, awarded for the best paper published in the Journal of the OR Society that year: in 2004 for modeling emergency healthcare services, in 2006 for modeling chlamydia infection, and in 2015 for modeling the dental workforce in Sri Lanka. In 2016 she was made a Companion of OR by the UK OR Society in recognition of her contribution to health OR.

Shane G. Henderson

Charles W. Lake, Jr. Professor in Productivity Operations Research and Information Engineering
Cornell University

Chasing Ambulances and COVID: Stories and Lessons

Despite being a confirmed academic nerd, Shane has had the good fortune to be involved in quite a few projects with real impact. In this talk, he’ll highlight two projects where simulation played a central role. In the first project, some simulation analysis he performed for an ambulance service provider was used in a consequential court case. In the second project, he was a member of a modeling team at Cornell University that played a central role in Cornell’s decision to reopen its Ithaca campus for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The team further advised Cornell throughout the pandemic on essentially all major decisions. It was a wild ride. He’ll tell these stories and draw lessons from them that he hopes will be useful and thought-provoking, whether you work in academia, industry, government or elsewhere.

Bio

Professor Shane G. Henderson holds the Charles W. Lake, Jr. Chair in Productivity in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) at Cornell University. His research interests include discrete-event simulation, simulation optimization, emergency services planning and transportation. He is an INFORMS Fellow and a co-recipient of the INFORMS Wagner Prize for his work on bike-sharing programs. He has served as the editor in chief of the open-access journal Stochastic Systems, as chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, as simulation area editor for Operations Research and as the Director of the School of ORIE. He likes cats, climbing walls, biking, Harry Potter and being a Dad.

MASM Keynote

Cathal Heavey

Professor, Supply Chain Management
School of Engineering
University of Limerick

Review of Past Research and Reflections on Digital Thread/Twin Affordability in (Semiconductor) Supply Chain and Manufacturing

This presentation will review past research projects on improving operations of manufacturing and supply chain systems with the goal of highlighting future research challenges. Several of these projects were in semiconductor manufacturing and supply chains. These past research projects were funded nationally, by the EU and industry. It will document several research challenges on topics of Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), optimization using online machine learning metamodels, simulation analysis of Advanced Planning System Analysis (APS), and supplier selection. Finally, the presentation will reflect on the role of Digital Thread/Twin and the feasibility of this approach with the current availability of methodologies, computing, and human resources.

Bio

Cathal Heavey is a Professor in Supply Chain Management at the University of Limerick. He has been involved in research projects funded from national (e.g., Enterprise Ireland) & European (e.g., European Union – Framework Programs 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020) sources as well as a several projects directly funded by industry. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Simulation, a publication of the OR Society, Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, Simulation: Transaction of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International and a past Department Editor of the IISE Transactions Journal a publication of The Institute of Industrial Engineers of America. He is a Program Member of the International Conference on Modeling and Analysis of Semiconductor Manufacturing (MASM) and a past and present program member of several other conferences.

Military Keynote

Andreas Tolk

Chief Scientist, Complex Systems Modeling
Modeling and Analysis Innovation Center
The MITRE Corporation

Combat and Complexity: Using Modeling and Simulation to Understand the Implications for the Next War

Ideas of complexity can be found in the works of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, so complexity in combat is not a new concept the military community and supporting modeling, simulation, and analysis experts must deal with. However, the amount of complexity increases. Early weapon systems did not reach beyond the direct control of the user. The battlefield could be delimited using organizational boundaries defining areas of responsibility assigned to local units. Today’s weapon effects reach beyond the control of the user. Areas of responsibility overlap. Unit boundaries are no longer efficient, but collaboration in the overlapping areas is needed. Today’s military operations increasingly rely upon joint, coalition, allied, and combined multilateral forces that are optimized, and task organized. Air, land, sea, space, and cyber operations are being tied together on a multidomain battlefield characterized by non linear operations in a networked kill web. Such kill webs provide a new from of operational agility that is far beyond current capabilities, but also requires new degrees of weapon system interoperability and a new concepts for battle management command and control. This presentation shows implications for the next war and recommends a closer collaboration with the complex adaptive systems community to benefit from their methods and tools.

Bio

Andreas Tolk is Chief Scientist for Complex Systems Modeling in the Modeling and Analysis
Innovation Center at The MITRE Corporation in Charlottesville, VA. He holds a variety of service and editorial roles within the simulation community, including having served on the WSC Governance Board from 2013 to 2021. He has an extensive publication record, including many contributions to the Command and Control Research Program and the System Analysis and Studies Group of NATOs Science and Technology Board. Among 14 other textbooks and compendiums on simulation and systems engineering topics he authored the textbook “Engineering Principles of Combat Modeling and Distributed Simulation,” published
2012 by Wiley. He received a PhD and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of the Federal Armed Forces, Germany. Andreas is a Fellow of SCS and a senior member of ACM and IEEE. He received distinguished contribution awards from ACM and SCS and was recognized as a “Titan of Simulation” at the Winter Simulation Conference 2021.