UC student distinguished at international competition

Paulo Nascimento, a student of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC), has won an international competition promoted by the American company Simio, which specialises in simulation and programming tools for industry and services.

The Student Simulation Competition is held twice a year and challenges university students from all over the world to find solutions to complex engineering problems, with awards going to the four best proposals.

In this edition, the challenge was to design a strategy for collecting, preparing and shipping orders in a distribution centre using a simulation approach.

Simulation is the representation of real-world processes and/or operations through control logic and mathematical expressions. " So, and according to the detail of the representation of the real system, it allows to understand what can happen in the system according to different scenarios tested. This not only allows significant savings to be made compared to experiments carried out on the real system, but also makes it possible to test scenarios that would be difficult to test in a real environment", explains Paulo Nascimento.

The implementation of this project was based on several requirements, particularly regarding warehouse management and process optimisation. In particular, Simio wanted a solution capable of balancing the workload throughout the warehouse, starting with the removal of items from the shelves where they are located, and later taking into account all the downstream processes, namely packaging. A simulation model of the distribution centre was also requested, in order to test various possible operating scenarios, obtaining conclusions about which are the best values to choose for the decision variables existing in the warehouse.

The solution proposed by the FCTUC student was based on a planning methodology that could improve the efficiency of the distribution centre. "It was possible to obtain results in the level of customer service of over 99%, improving the warehouse's performance indexes in relation to the previous values, and with the possibility of reducing the workforce on days when there are not too high peaks in demand".

For Paulo Nascimento, participating in this type of competition is "extremely important, as it allows us to escape a little from the academic context and have contact with what awaits us outside the university, not only in terms of the nature of the existing problems, but also in their own complexity. In addition, the demands of this type of project are something that every student should experience, as it allows us to develop both professional and personal skills that will be essential when entering the job market".

This simulation project was supervised by Professor Samuel Moniz, who stresses the importance of student participation in these initiatives "because they allow the development of skills in fundamental topics of Industrial and Management Engineering, such as the digital transformation of systems or the modelling of complex problems". Moniz adds that "the simulation of systems has the ultimate objective of promoting innovation and increasing the efficiency of processes, whether they are logistics centres, supply chains, hospitals, etc.".

^{Translation by Diana Taborda}