C4NGP Symposium
The 2018 International Symposium in Modelling and Simulation for Smart Systems (MSQ 2018) was held in National University of Singapore on October 18 and 19, 2018. Over 100 participants from universities and industries to exchange ideas on the latest technical trends, research developments, and practical applications in maritime systems and urban logistics areas.
Day1:
Academic Session:
Prof Chelsea White III set about the Symposium with his keynote speech. He explained the contextual relevance of the Symposium by focussing on various forces that are affecting the maritime industry. He brought about the potential positive impact that simulation and modelling of ports can have on the industry. He concluded by underlining the possible impact of C4NGP in tackling the pain-points of the maritime industry. Professor Victor Jorge Leon presented a new network decomposition termed connected acyclic-and-transpose graph (CATg) that facilitates the theoretical analysis and detection of a class of deadlocks during the dynamic generation of AGV routing schedules. The routing methodology integrates theories from the fields of graph, deadlock, resource-constrained scheduling and vehicle routing. Professor (Samuel) Qing-Shan Jia presented the research related to Cyber-Physical Energy Systems (CPES) in which information exchange is a major force multiplier for increasing the efficiency of the energy sector. He shared with the audience a multi-scale event-based reinforcement learning method which makes decisions only when certain events occur. It uses policy projection and state & action aggregation to connect the models in multiple scales. Dr (George) Guoquan Liu spoke about the project of enhancing the efficiency of a returnable package business using dynamic inventory sharing. Dr Zhou Chenhao presented the various R&D efforts undertaken by C4NGP to tackle the problems related to the design and operations of a large port system.
Industry session:
Prof. Enver Yucesan from INSEAD delivered a keynote on how computer simulation can be useful in efficient decision making. He demonstrated this with several real life examples that matches the current challenges very closely. His keynote speech seamlessly set the stage for a session on application side of the smart operations and what efforts various industries are taking in making the smart system for their respective organizations. Mr. Loy from PSA showcased PSA’s capabilities in terms of making the efficient port operations and set the targeted areas in the port operations where simulation and optimization can be applied in order to achieve the targeted efficiency in future generation ports. The continuing links to the port operations, the logistics, was covered by Mr. Horson from STlogistics. In his talk, he showcased STLogistics’s capabilities of achieving more efficicient operations via simulating their operations through their control tower- SiTadeL. This followed by the talk by Ms. Stuti Nautiyal from SimPlus, where she demonstrated what different activities her organization is engaged in and different challenges that will be posed in the future. The importance of optimization techniques in making business was covered by Dr. Steven Yao. Dr. Yao showcased various case studies in which optimization has great potentials in making more profits. The last in the industry session was the talk by Dr. Li Haobin from ISE-NUS. Dr. Li put forward the future generation of the smart systems and what he and his team in C4NGP/C4NGL is trying to achieve via several evolution of O2DES framework.
Day 2:
The second day of the Symposium witnessed enthusiastic response from students from Singapore as well as abroad. The presentations were categorized into four themes; Smart Traffic Systems, Smart Manufacturing & Logistics, Sharing economy and crowdsourcing, and Smart Analytics. A total of 14 presentations invited a lot of audience involvement and generated lively discussions.
One of the interesting feature of this symposium was the wrap-up session chaired by Prof. Lee Loo Hay with the panel members, who are the peers in the academic world. The panel members shared their experiences, shared their advice and guides the audience who is majority in the early stage of academic and industry career. Special thanks to Prof. Chip White, Prof. Melvin Sim and Prof. Victor Leon.
One of the biggest attraction of the symposium was the port visit where several participants (industry and academic) visited Pasir Panjang terminal of PSA. The PSA tour was fruitful in witnessing the complex port operations and what will be future challenges and how PSA is planned to tackle these in their future terminal of operations- Tuas terminal. This tour also covered the living lab of PSA where fully automated operations were being tested using AGVs.
We would like to extend our sincere gratitude and appreciation to all our participants for making the 2018 International Symposium in Modelling and Simulation for Smart Systems a success.
