Roberto Revetria

Operative requirements and advances for the new generation simulators in multimodal container terminals

The paper outlines the evolution of container terminal requirements for simulation and the potential of new advanced techniques in the integration with these aspects; the authors present application examples and experimental results that maximized the impact of these new concepts in real complex port realities.

Agent directed HLA simulation for complex supply chain modeling

The authors outline a new modeling methodology designed to simulate a complex logistics network and to ensure interoperability through application of Intelligent Agent High-Level Architecture for distributed supply chain management.

Risk analysis in harbor environments using simulation

The paper proposes the development of an integrated interactive environment for risk analysis applied to harbor and maritime environments. This approach is very effective for properly designing the harbor and maritime infrastructure in terms of resources, structures and services for facing possible emergencies. The authors describe the general architecture of this tool and the integration with a specific simulation module devoted to an oil spill study and analysis, including experimental results and statistical validation.

Monte Carlo Simulation Models Evolving in Replicated Runs: A Methodology to Choose the Optimal Experimental Sample Size

The idea of a methodology capable of determining in a precise and practical way the optimal sample size came from studying Monte Carlo simulation models concerning financial problems, risk analysis, and supply chain forecasting. In these cases the number of extractions from the frequency distributions characterizing the model is inadequate or limited to just one, so it is necessary to replicate simulation runs many times in order to obtain a complete statistical description of the model variables. Generally, as shown in the literature, the sample size is fixed by the experimenter based on empirical assumptions without considering the impact on result accuracy in terms of tolerance interval. In this paper, the authors propose a methodology by means of which it is possible to graphically highlight the evolution of experimental error variance as a function of the sample size. Therefore, the experimenter can choose the best ratio between the experimental cost and the expected results.

Simulation as support for production planning in small and medium enterprise: a case study

The proposed application is related to an Italian small factory that produces, assembles, and sells mechanical components for awnings. In such factories BPR (business process engineering) usually takes place without the support of modeling & simulation although such methodologies have proved to be very effective and helpful. Main reasons for that have to be investigated in the high costs usually associated with a simulation study, especially for data collection, model building and model validation. In order to avoid this problem a general-purpose simulation framework was designed enabling self-build according to production process information stored in a relational database. Moreover, the simulation model was used in conjunction with a statistical analysis tool in order to build the relationship among selected parameters and the proposed objective function by mean of response surface methodology and 2nd order regressions meta-models. Authors applied the proposed schema to several industrial applications obtaining interesting results.

Improving healthcare using cognitive computing based software: an application in emergency situation

The goal of this paper is to define the platform specifications dealing with medical information sharing both from research viewpoint and in terms of local health care. The purpose of this research work is based on doctor - patient relationships: VDS - Virtual Medical Doctor System. At this stage the platform is only used for scientific purposes. In particular, we assume the integrated design of the platform based on different levels (layers), which may be interconnected through the information flows (or links). The first level (the lower) involves the construction of a VDS platform. Based on this system it is possible to foresee a number of extensions such as social network for scientific research design, and risk analysis tool.

Using system dynamics for short life cycle supply chains evaluation

This work is part of an Italian National Research Project embracing different aspects of a short life-cycle products supply chains: its modeling, its resiliency and its competitiveness. In fact, this particular kind of products, like fashion goods, toys or electronic devices, have different characteristics compared with long-medium life cycle products and this implies a quite different management as well as competitiveness factors to take into account. Starting from the modeling of a supply chain of this kind, utilizing the Powersim Studio Software implementing the System Dynamics methodology, with the goal of showing its behavior under specific scenarios, some vulnerability causes have been considered in order to make the supply chain more resilient. Finally, the competitiveness dynamics between two companies producing short life cycle items has been modeled and analyzed.

A generalized simulation framework to manage logistics systems: a case study in waste management and environmental protection

This paper presents an innovative modeling framework able to support planning, management and optimization of waste collection operations in an urban context. A proprietary simulator composed by three functionality modules (Global Positioning System, Data Mining system, Simulator for routing and resource exploitation) was implemented by the authors, and was then validated on a specific set of case studies. This application has been made possible within PLANAGO regional government funded research project and was based on previous experiences of the authors. This approach was also extended beyond the particular application and is now under test in different application fields strictly related to logistics and environmental protection.

Simulation-based VV&A methodology for HLA federations: an example from the Aerospace industry

This paper establishes a methodology for the validation of a whole federation of simulation models which represent the reality of the supply chain in the context of the aerospace industry. There are many possible ways to address this problem, among these, the simplest way appears to be the analysis of the real-life situation, based on historical data. The use of historical data is not always a viable approach, due to the lack of a sufficiently extensive pool of reliable data. Therefore a simulation-based VV&A approach is often required before the operative use of models. Historical data is reproduced through a long series of runs of a simulation meta-model. The major issue associated to the validation of a federation of simulation models is that each simulation model needs to be validated as stand-alone and at the same time it needs to be validated as a member of the whole federation, or of a portion of it.

An Innovative Contribution to Health Technology Assessment

Healthcare is moving towards increased assistance needs with limited resources, both in economics terms, in personnel or space terms, leading to the usage of specific analysis for the acquisition, evaluation and assessment of medical technologies. The systematic evaluation of properties, effects or other impacts of a medical (or health) technology with a broad multidisciplinary approach is named Health Technology Assessment (HTA).This work presents an approach of a HTA protocol for the classification of hospitals or health facilities equipments, realized by combining the classic HTA concepts with hierarchic clustering techniques in a multidisciplinary analysis of requirements, cost, impact of logistics, technology associated risks.