Winter SImulation Conference 2011

Had another good year at the Winter Simulaton Conference last year in Tempe, AZ. I didn't get to play golf (which is lucky for everyone else on the course), and there was more rain than I'd like, but the conference itself was probably the best I've been too (out of 6). It didn't hurt that they had the conference mere miles from an in-n-out burger. But I felt that manufacturing is starting to get a little more popular at the conference, which I like.

I also was blown away by Simio for the 4th year in a row, with their announcement of the Risk-based Planning & Scheduling tool they've released. I also took their practitioners training course, which showed me even more how powerful, and great their product is becoming.

Forio was there again and was very interesting as always, as they now have support for running discrete event simulations in "the cloud." Very cool technology, which I think has a lot of potential for helping make simulation more of an every-day tool, on top of the education arena they seem to be popular in.

For the first time, I chaired a session of presentations, and was very impressed with the papers presented on auto-generated simulation models. I also presented in the Sustainability track on manufacturing sustainability (I think...it's been a couple months, and I guess I should have posted this sooner). Anyway, it was probably nothing terribly new for anyone who reads this blog, but I feel it was probably the last I'll talk about my work on CMSD, at least for a while:

If anyone has any comments or questions I'm always happy to respond. Though, the "contact me" link on the top right seems to get to me much faster than the comments. At least until I find a way to automatically subscribe to all comments...