Keynotes

2024 WSC Keynote

Simulation for Disney Parks and Experiences

Amy Sardeshmukh, Senior Manager, Industrial Engineering, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts
Frederick Zahrn, Director, Decision Science Transformation, Disney Worldwide Services
Michael Tschanz, Director, Engineering Technology and Analysis, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Bios

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.